Making Things Worse Pays Off Now. Cory Doctorow Explains Why.

When Cory Doctorow spoke at Bioneers in 2017, the warning signs were already there. But in the years since, the tech landscape has become more extractive and more brittle at the same time — less accountable, harder to leave, and easier to break.

Doctorow has spent decades thinking and writing at the intersection of technology, power, and democracy. An award-winning science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist, he is the author of dozens of books — including the recent nonfiction work Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (read an excerpt here) — and a longtime advocate for an open, repairable, and more humane internet. He works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, writes the daily blog Pluralistic, and teaches and researches technology policy at institutions including Cornell, MIT, and the University of North Carolina.

What’s shifted in Doctorow’s thinking isn’t just a growing catalog of bad tech behavior. It’s a clearer diagnosis of the conditions that allow those behaviors to win. When competition, regulation, labor power, and interoperability are weakened or removed, the worst incentives inside companies stop being fringe ideas and start becoming the dominant strategy.

And that dynamic doesn’t stay contained within the tech sector. It shows up in environmental destruction and e-waste, in fragile infrastructure and locked-down clean energy systems, in the erosion of worker power, and in the steady narrowing of democratic choice. In this conversation, Doctorow traces how we got here — not as an inevitability, but as the foreseeable result of policy decisions made in living memory — and what it would take to rebuild the collective power needed to change course.

Cory Doctorow will be speaking at Bioneers 2026 in March. Learn more and register here.

Bioneers: A lot of people talk about “greedy tech companies” or “bad CEOs.” That’s not quite how you frame the problem. What do you think actually changed?

Cory Doctorow: It’s not unusual for the leadership of a company to be greedy. That’s always been true. What’s changed is that firms can now be openly abusive and still thrive. In fact, they can often make more money by making their products worse.

That’s the part people should really be alarmed by. In a healthy system, bad behavior is supposed to be kept in check by competition, regulation, workers pushing back, or customers walking away. What we’ve done over the last several decades is remove those sources of discipline, one by one.

So instead of obsessing over whether individual executives are uniquely awful, which, frankly, is beside the point, we should be looking at the policies and enforcement failures that let this behavior win. When companies no longer fear competitors, regulators, labor pressure, or interoperability, the worst incentives rise to the top. And that’s how you end up with products that are clearly not fit for purpose, but are still wildly profitable.

Bioneers: You coined the term “enshittification” to describe what happens to platforms over time. What do you mean by that?

Cory: I’ve been doing digital rights work for a long time, and a big part of the job is coming up with language people can actually remember: metaphors, framing devices, sometimes slightly rude words. “Enshittification” started almost as a joke, but it stuck because it names something people instantly recognize.

The pattern itself has three stages.

In the first stage, platforms are good to their users. They offer useful features, generous terms, and a decent experience. The goal is to hook people and lock them in.

Once users are locked in, the platform enters a second stage: It makes things worse for users in order to benefit business customers — advertisers, sellers, publishers — who also become dependent on access to those users and get locked in themselves.

Then comes the third stage. The platform starts extracting value from the business customers, too. Because they can’t easily leave, value is withdrawn from both sides and shoveled upward to executives and shareholders.

This isn’t a conspiracy. No one has to twirl a mustache in a dark room. It’s a predictable incentive pattern that emerges when escape routes disappear … when there’s no real competition, no meaningful regulation, and no way out. Once discipline is removed, this behavior becomes rational. And that’s why we see it over and over again.

Bioneers: Do you think companies set out to enshittify their products, or does this happen gradually?

Cory: It’s incremental. Firms are always trying to pay as little as possible for their inputs and charge as much as possible for their outputs. That’s capitalism 101.

What normally constrains that behavior is what economists call discipline: competition, regulation, labor pressure, and the risk that customers will leave. In a healthy system, companies try a lot of bad ideas, and most of them fail. You make the product worse, people bail. Regulators intervene. Workers revolt. Or someone invents a better alternative.

What’s changed is that many of those constraints have been stripped away. When companies no longer fear competition or enforcement, tactics that would once have destroyed a business suddenly make sense.

You can think of it as experimentation under different conditions. If a company tries something abusive and it blows up in their face, that becomes a lesson. But if it works — if profits rise and no one can escape — then that behavior spreads. Over time, the worst incentives win, not because companies suddenly became more evil, but because we redesigned the system to reward them.

It’s not unusual for the leadership of a company to be greedy. That’s always been true. What’s changed is that firms can now be openly abusive and still thrive.

Bioneers: Can you point to a concrete example of how this dynamic plays out?

Cory: A really clear example is Google Search.

By 2019, Google had achieved a roughly 90 percent market share. At that point, you can’t grow by getting more users; you already have almost everyone. But Google still needed to show revenue growth to investors, and that created a crisis inside the company.

What came out in the antitrust cases was an internal fight over what to do next. One faction argued for improving search: making it more accurate, more useful, better for users. Another faction proposed something much simpler: make search worse in a way that shows people more ads.

The idea was to stop “one-shotting” queries. Instead of giving you the best answer right away, Google could force you to run multiple searches, which means more chances to shove ads in your face. From a user’s perspective, search gets worse. From a revenue perspective, it works.

And the reason that faction won is straightforward: Users couldn’t easily leave. Google had locked up defaults on browsers, phones, and operating systems. When competition is effectively neutralized, the risk of users fleeing just isn’t credible anymore.

That’s the key point. When a company knows it can’t easily lose its customers, the argument for degrading the product starts to sound not just acceptable, but smart. And once that logic wins internally, everyone else lives with the consequences.

Bioneers: You’ve said this outcome wasn’t inevitable — that it didn’t have to turn out this way. What made it possible?

Cory: If you look back, there are very specific policy decisions made in living memory that set us on this path. One of the biggest was the decision to stop enforcing antitrust law.

Starting in the 1970s, economists and legal thinkers associated with the Chicago School pushed the idea that monopolies should be presumed efficient. The logic was that if one company dominates a market, it must be because it’s just better. Under that framework, breaking up monopolies starts to look perverse, like punishing success.

Fast forward 40 years and, surprise, we have monopolies everywhere.

That has an immediate effect: Companies no longer fear competition, so they can degrade products without worrying that users will leave. But there’s also a second-order effect that’s just as important. Monopoly makes regulatory capture much easier. When a sector collapses into one dominant firm or a small cartel, it’s far easier for those firms to coordinate lobbying, influence regulators, and bend policy to their will.

And this isn’t abstract. Judges, for example, are required to attend continuing education seminars. In one example, some of those seminars — lavish, industry-funded junkets — offered one-sided arguments against antitrust enforcement. We know which judges attended, and we can see how their rulings changed afterward.

This is how systems get baked in. Not through a single dramatic moment, but through a long series of quiet decisions that tilt the playing field until the outcome feels inevitable, even though it never was.

Bioneers: You’ve also focused a lot on anti-circumvention law and the right to repair. Why does that matter so much?

Cory: Anti-circumvention law makes it illegal to modify, fix, or interoperate with devices in ways the manufacturer doesn’t approve of, even if you own the damn thing.

At the simplest level, it blocks repair. When companies can prevent independent fixes or replacement parts, devices become disposable by design. That drives mountains of e-waste and forces people to replace things that could easily be kept running.

But it goes way beyond phones and laptops. This kind of lock-in makes critical systems brittle. We’ve seen it with medical devices, with infrastructure, and with clean tech — solar inverters, batteries, farm equipment — where cloud control and parts pairing determine whether something works at all.

Once everything is connected to the cloud and legally protected from modification, manufacturers gain terrifying power. They can impose subscriptions after the fact, withdraw features, or just decide that something you already bought doesn’t work anymore.

And here’s the part people don’t want to think about: If companies can remotely disable devices, that power doesn’t stay commercial. It becomes political. We’ve already seen equipment shut down from afar. Once that capability exists, it will be used.

When repair and modification are illegal, systems don’t just get more profitable. They get more fragile.

When a company knows it can’t easily lose its customers, the argument for degrading the product starts to sound not just acceptable, but smart. And once that logic wins internally, everyone else lives with the consequences.

Bioneers: When you talk about “fixing” this system, what does that look like in practice?

Cory: No one is going to repeal the laws of physics. Things will break. The question is whether we’re allowed to fix them.

This isn’t about making executives nice people. It’s about restoring the conditions that punish bad behavior. When competition, interoperability, repair, and enforcement are real, the worst tactics stop working.

Take Adobe’s move to Creative Cloud. People woke up one day and found they had to pay a monthly fee just to access colors they’d already used in their own work. Files broke. Nothing improved; it just turned into a tollbooth. In a functional system, that would create an opening for competitors to step in and siphon users away.

Same with paywalled hardware features like cars where part of the battery you already bought is locked behind a subscription. That shit only works when people can’t leave and when no one is allowed to build tools that undo it.

When escape routes exist, internal power dynamics change. The people arguing to degrade products for short-term profit stop winning every argument. You’ll always have ambitious, ruthless actors inside companies, but they don’t get to dictate outcomes for everyone else.

This isn’t fate, and it’s not the iron laws of economics. We’re living with the foreseeable outcomes of specific policy decisions, made by people who were warned about what would happen and did it anyway.

Bioneers: For people who aren’t tech executives or policymakers, what’s actually within their control?

Cory: The biggest mistake we make is treating this like a personal purity test: thinking that if we make the right consumer choices, the system will magically fix itself. That’s bullshit, especially in monopolized markets.

This is the same lesson people have learned in climate work. You can make thoughtful choices about how you live, but agonizing over them won’t stop wildfires. What matters is acting as part of a polity, not as an isolated consumer.

That means collective action. Advocacy organizations matter. Organized boycotts matter. But a boycott isn’t quietly choosing a different brand at the store. It’s public, collective, and done in solidarity, especially with workers.

The encouraging part is that these struggles are connected. Concentrated corporate power shows up as broken tech, environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and democratic erosion. When you see that connection, you stop feeling alone, and you start building coalitions that can actually change the rules.

Bioneers: Is there anything you want people to hold onto as they leave this conversation?

Cory: Solidarity is the answer.

This isn’t fate, and it’s not the iron laws of economics. We’re living with the foreseeable outcomes of specific policy decisions, made by people who were warned about what would happen and did it anyway.

What’s been taken from us is a sense of collective agency. We’ve been told to act as isolated consumers instead of workers, neighbors, and citizens with shared interests. When that happens, concentrated power rushes in to fill the void.

Rebuilding discipline in markets and technology doesn’t require heroic virtue or perfect knowledge. It requires collective action, enforcement, and the willingness to choose different rules — and different leaders — when the old ones fail. It’s hard work, but it’s not complicated. And it’s still within our power.

Cory Doctorow will be speaking at Bioneers 2026 in March. Learn more and register here.

Beyond the Page: How Bay Nature Connects People to Place

Environmental change doesn’t begin with policy or technology alone. It begins with attention — with the stories we tell, the places we come to know, and the communities we choose to stay connected to.

For 25 years, Bay Nature has been doing exactly that work in the San Francisco Bay Area: helping local people understand, experience, and care for the natural world through deeply reported environmental journalism and place-based engagement. Founded as an independent, nonprofit publication and still rooted in print, Bay Nature occupies a unique position in the region’s environmental ecosystem — not just reporting on the work of scientists, conservationists, and civic leaders, but actively connecting them. As Executive Director and Publisher Wes Radez puts it, Bay Nature serves as “a reminder of why a lot of people are drawn to this work in the first place.”

That connective role has become more complex in recent years, as independent media organizations navigate a rapidly shifting information landscape and increasing economic pressure. Bay Nature, which reaches thousands of highly engaged members across the region, has spent the past several years asking a fundamental question Radez returns to often: How does a small, independent publisher survive and thrive in an increasingly hostile media environment while continuing to produce high-quality journalism?

The answer, it turns out, has less to do with chasing trends than with deep listening. Since joining Bay Nature in 2022, Radez has helped guide the organization through a period of reflection and reinvention — one that treats journalism not as a product alone, but as a living relationship between people, place, and shared curiosity.

In the conversation that follows, Radez reflects on Bay Nature’s evolving role as a regional media hub, what it’s learned by listening closely to its community, and how place-based journalism can help move people from overwhelm to connection, engagement, and hope.

Bioneers: What does building a nature community look like in a diverse region like the Bay Area?

Wes Radez, Executive Director/Publisher of Bay Nature: From a storytelling perspective, it’s really important that we support a wide range of perspectives — and that those stories are told by the people who hold them. That means providing agency, platform, and support so stories aren’t told on behalf of communities, but from within them. Whether we’re centering Indigenous voices, amplifying rural perspectives from the Central Valley, or highlighting lived experiences that don’t always get space in environmental media, the goal is to help as many people as possible see themselves and their stories reflected in our pages.

From a community standpoint, we take the idea of “meeting people where they are” quite literally. The Bay Area stretches from Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz, across ten counties, and while there are shared values that connect people across that region, the way environmental issues show up can look very different depending on where you live. Someone in Berkeley is going to experience and think about these issues differently than someone in Redwood City or farther out.

In the process of spending so much time meeting our community face to face, it’s been really striking to notice that when people come together at our events, even if they’ve never met before, there’s often an immediate sense of belonging. Within minutes, people feel at home because of shared values and shared curiosity.

That’s why creating consistent, place-based opportunities to gather — whether through talks, hikes, or field experiences tied to our journalism — has become such an important part of how we think about community. It’s where stories move off the page and into relationship.

UC Berkeley doctoral student, Trinity Walls co-hosts a spider seeking nature walk with Bay Nature in Berkeley, on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025. (Photo: Amir Aziz/Bay Nature)

Bioneers: Tell us more about how Bay Nature has adapted to survive and grow in a challenging media landscape.

Wes: I joke that magazine publishing wasn’t in great shape when Bay Nature was founded 25 years ago, and it hasn’t exactly improved since.

During the pandemic, we saw what many organizations saw: a big upswell in interest in the outdoors. People were hiking, reading, and engaging with environmental content in new ways, and all of our metrics were moving up and to the right. Then, as the world reopened in 2020 and 2021, it was like watching the tide roll back out. Engagement dropped, and like many small organizations, we were left with very little room for error.

I joined Bay Nature in late 2022, and the initial charge from the board was to help the organization find a more sustainable path forward. We responded by doing a lot of listening: audience surveys, focus groups, and countless one-on-one conversations. I’ve spent the past few years traveling across the region, meeting people face-to-face and really trying to understand what Bay Nature means to them.

Two insights came through very clearly. The first was that people wanted much more active engagement with Bay Nature. They didn’t just want to read stories; they wanted to hike with us, visit the places we covered, talk directly with scientists and researchers, and experience the work in real life. There was a sense that we had been leaving people at the water’s edge, and they wanted to go further.

The second insight was that our audience already saw themselves as a community, even before we fully understood ourselves that way. People would tell me they’d been “members” for years. Internally, we still thought of them as subscribers or readers, but they felt a much deeper sense of belonging. Recognizing that shift from audience to community became a turning point for the organization.

Bioneers: How did Bay Nature change its model based on what you learned from your community?

Wes: Those insights led us, in January of 2024, to launch a new membership program. For $40 a year, members receive the four quarterly issues of our magazine that we’ve been publishing for decades, along with access to an entirely new events program designed to bring our journalism to life.

What that’s looked like in practice has been a really dramatic shift. Starting essentially from zero, we produced more than 80 events in the past year. And nearly every one of those events connects directly back to a piece of our reporting. It gives people a way to go deeper into the stories, to meet the writers, the scientists, and the experts behind the work, and to experience these places and issues together.

Because the events happen so frequently, something else has started to happen, too: people get to know one another. We get to know them. Over time, through those repeated interactions, real relationships form. What began as reading a story turns into shared experience, and that shared experience becomes community. 

Bioneers: Which stories or experiences have resonated most with the Bay Nature community recently?

Wes: One of the most joyful things about this question is that there really isn’t a single answer. There are as many responses as there are members of our community. You can pick almost any environmental topic out of a hat, and on a Tuesday afternoon, we’ll have 100 people show up eager to learn — whether it’s about monarch butterflies, birding, mushrooms, or marine life. What we’ve learned is that Bay Nature is really a constellation of small, deeply engaged micro-communities, each with its own interests and passions.

On a more personal level, one of the things I’m proudest of right now is our journalism itself. For the second year in a row, Bay Nature won multiple Excellence in Journalism awards from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. What made that especially meaningful is that the awards went to some of our youngest reporters.

We run a journalism fellowship program in partnership with the Schmidt Family Foundation, and after the past two years, every fellow who’s come through the program has gone on to continue their career as an award-winning journalist. At a time when journalism needs strong on-ramps more than ever, being able to support emerging writers and send them out into the world with that kind of foundation is incredibly gratifying.

Bioneers: How does Bay Nature help people move from environmental overwhelm to engagement or hope?

Wes: I think it starts by making big, global issues feel as local, personal, and manageable as possible. Climate change and biodiversity loss can feel overwhelming very quickly. But when you bring the focus closer to home, people begin to see where they actually have agency.

A good example is a recent series we did on local native bees. Their habitats are changing in a warming world, and it would be easy to throw up your hands and feel helpless about that. Instead, through a combination of reporting and field-based events, we brought people right down to the level of their own backyards, showing how small changes they could make at home could meaningfully improve conditions for these insects. It took something enormous and abstract and made it tangible and actionable.

The other piece is trust in journalism itself. We’re not an advocacy organization, but we are very aware that we serve a community of people who care deeply and are already engaged in change. We lay out the facts, tell the story clearly and impartially, and then let people and organizations decide how to act on that information. We are reminded that people will protect what they love, and they will love what they understand. Good storytelling is one of the best ways to build that understanding.

It’s incredibly gratifying to see our journalism travel beyond our pages — showing up in grant applications, city council presentations, and policy discussions. While we’re not advocates ourselves, it’s powerful to see information used as an instrument for real-world change. That’s where hope starts to take root.

Bioneers: Has Bay Nature changed how you personally experience the Bay Area?

Wes: Absolutely. For me, the biggest shift has come from spending so much time out in the field: traveling across the region, meeting with community members, and seeing these places up close. As I move through the Bay Area, I find the built environment almost melting away. What comes into focus instead is how present the natural world really is.

Everything we write about — the issues we cover, the actions we highlight — it’s all right there. It’s at the edge of the highway, around the next bend in a country road, in people’s backyards. None of it is abstract or far away. Bay Nature is a deeply local organization, and our journalism reflects that. What we’re writing about is the lived reality of this place.

Experiencing that through my own eyes has reinforced how powerful community-based reporting can be. It’s not just about telling stories. It’s about helping people see what’s already in front of them, and understanding their relationship to it in a new way.

Become a Bay Nature Member to receive quarterly issues of Bay Nature magazine online and mailed to your home, plus live educational talks and naturalist-led hikes that bring its stories to life. Learn more at baynature.org.

Listening Is Not Neutral: New Ethical Guardrails for Animal Communication Technologies

In recent years, scientists have begun using artificial intelligence to analyze animal communication at a previously impossible scale and level of precision. Machine learning models are being trained on thousands of whale vocalizations. Bioacoustic tools are parsing bird calls, rodent ultrasounds, and the complex signals exchanged by bees, dolphins, and elephants. What once required years of human observation can now happen in months or even days.

For the Bioneers community, this moment is not theoretical. Over many years, Bioneers has been honored to host and collaborate with researchers, legal scholars, and artists grappling with what it means to listen to the more-than-human world with care. In 2025, that work came into sharp focus when César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of the NYU More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, joined Project CETI founder David Gruber on the Bioneers stage to explore both the promise and the peril of emerging animal communication technologies.

This emerging field of “nonhuman animal communication technologies” is often described in terms of its tantalizing promise. Researchers point to new insights into animal behavior, improved conservation strategies, and the possibility of understanding other species on their own terms. In a moment defined by ecological crisis, the idea of learning to listen more carefully to the living world carries obvious appeal.

But listening to and decoding other species’ communications, especially when mediated by powerful technologies, is not a neutral act.

As these tools advance, they raise difficult questions about power, responsibility, and restraint. What does it mean to translate another species’ communication through human-built systems? When does listening become surveillance, interference, or extraction? And how do we ensure that technologies developed in the name of care do not ultimately deepen harm?

A new report from the NYU More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program suggests that the future of nonhuman animal communication technologies needs to be shaped as much by ethical considerations as by technical capabilities. At stake is not just how much we can learn about other species but whether we are prepared to engage them as kin, rather than resources, in a rapidly changing world.

What Are Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies?

Nonhuman animal communication technologies — often shortened to NACTs — are tools designed to record, analyze, and sometimes respond to the ways other animals communicate. They draw on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced computing to detect patterns in animal sounds, movements, and behaviors that would be difficult or impossible for humans to recognize on our own.

In practice, this can mean training AI models on thousands of whale vocalizations, analyzing ultrasonic calls made by rodents, or studying how birds or bees signal to one another within complex social systems. Most current efforts focus on listening rather than “talking back”: collecting large datasets and using computational tools to better understand how animals communicate with each other in the wild.

At present, the vast majority of NACTs are still in the research phase, developed and used by interdisciplinary scientific teams, but the field is expanding quickly. As interest grows, so does the possibility that these technologies could move beyond carefully controlled research settings into consumer-facing apps that claim to translate pets’ emotions, or into commercial and even military applications that use animals as sources of data, labor, or surveillance.

That distinction matters. The ethical questions raised by careful scientific listening are not the same as those raised by commodification, mass deployment, or use by untrained or nefarious actors. Understanding where and how these technologies are applied may determine whether they deepen our relationship with the more-than-human world or further exploit it.

The Overlooked Risks of “Listening”

The idea of listening to other species carries an intuitive sense of care, but as the MOTH report makes clear, listening through powerful technologies can introduce new forms of harm, especially when those tools are deployed without strong ethical guardrails, and the risks extend far beyond individual animals into the fabric of entire ecosystems.

Physical harms are often the most visible. Collecting data can involve tagging, sampling, or repeated human proximity, all of which can cause injury, exhaustion, or stress. Even noninvasive tools such as microphones or underwater playback devices can contribute to noise pollution, disrupting animals’ ability to navigate, hunt, or communicate. At larger scales, these risks multiply. If NACTs are commercialized or widely deployed, untrained users or military actors could use them to harass, exploit, or weaponize animals, turning living beings into tools for dubious human ends.

Less visible, but no less serious, are mental and emotional harms. Animals subjected to constant monitoring may experience chronic stress or confusion, particularly if unfamiliar sounds or signals are introduced into their environments. Attempts at “talking back” carry their own dangers: Hearing what seems like the voice of a fellow whale, bird, or dolphin — only to discover it originates from humans — could cause fear, disorientation, or grief. The report also raises a profound concern about privacy: What does it mean to extract and store intimate details of animals’ lives when they cannot consent or understand how that data will be used?

Beyond individuals, NACTs can produce relational harms by disrupting social bonds and collective behaviors. Many species rely on communication to coordinate migration, care for young, share knowledge, and maintain kinship networks. Interference, whether through noise, surveillance, or behavioral manipulation, can fracture these systems, weakening communities in ways that are difficult to detect until damage is already done.

Finally, there are ecological harms. Because species are embedded in complex, interdependent systems, disturbances rarely stop at a single animal or group. Disrupted communication can alter predator-prey relationships, migration routes, and reproductive success, triggering ripple effects that cascade across ecosystems. In a time of accelerating biodiversity loss, even small interventions can have outsized consequences.

A Deeper Ethical Shift: From Domination to Kinship

At its core, the debate over nonhuman animal communication technologies is not just about risk mitigation; it’s about worldview. The MOTH report invites a fundamental ethical shift, seeing animals not as data sources or experimental subjects, but as beings with their own lives, relationships, and intrinsic value.

This perspective moves away from anthropocentrism, which places human needs, knowledge, and convenience at the center of decision-making, and toward ecocentrism, which recognizes humans as participants in a wider web of life. From this vantage point, the goal of listening is not mastery or control, but relationship. Listening becomes an act of humility — an acknowledgment that other species communicate in ways shaped by senses, social structures, and intelligences very different from our own.

That distinction is important because technologies are never neutral. Tools designed to “translate” animal communication risk flattening rich, contextual forms of expression into human categories of meaning. When we prioritize what sounds familiar or intelligible to us, we may inadvertently privilege certain species, behaviors, or signals while ignoring or misinterpreting others. In the worst cases, translation becomes a form of extraction: pulling meaning out of animals to serve human curiosity, profit, or power.

The report argues instead for an ethic of kinship — one that asks humans to meet other species where they are, rather than demanding they speak in ways we recognize. This approach does not reject science or technology. It insists that innovation be guided by care, restraint, and respect for the autonomy of the more-than-human world. In a time of ecological unraveling, how we choose to listen may matter as much as what we hear.

Guardrails, Not Brakes: The PEPP Framework

The MOTH report is careful to make one thing clear: It is not an argument against technology. It does not call for halting research or abandoning innovation. Instead, it offers guardrails: ethical and legal principles designed to ensure that new tools meant to help us listen do not end up causing harm.

At the center of the report is the PEPP Framework, a set of principles organized around four core commitments: Prepare, Engage, Prevent, and Protect. Together, they form a values-based approach to the design and use of nonhuman animal communication technologies.

To prepare means grounding research in rigorous scientific design and strong ethical governance before technologies are deployed. To engage means consulting widely — not only with scientists and engineers, but with Indigenous knowledge holders, conservation experts, and others whose relationships with nonhuman life offer essential insight. To prevent harm requires taking precaution seriously, especially in the face of uncertainty, and placing the burden of justification on those introducing risk. And to protect means centering the autonomy, dignity, and best interests of animals themselves.

Across these pillars runs a consistent thread: transparency, accountability, and responsibility. The framework emphasizes that harms should be anticipated where possible, monitored continuously, and urgently addressed when they occur. In doing so, it reframes ethics not as an obstacle to discovery, but as a condition for research that truly serves life — human and more-than-human alike.

Why This Conversation Extends Beyond Researchers

While most nonhuman animal communication technologies are still being developed within scientific research settings, their implications extend far beyond the lab. Once tools exist, they rarely remain confined to their original context.

Funders influence which projects scale and which safeguards are prioritized. Tech companies shape how tools are packaged, marketed, and deployed. Conservation groups may adopt these technologies in the field, sometimes under pressure to act quickly in the face of ecological collapse. Policymakers determine whether meaningful oversight exists or whether a regulatory vacuum persists. And the public, increasingly exposed to simplified or sensationalized versions of “animal translation,” helps determine what becomes normalized, celebrated, or questioned.

The MOTH report argues that without shared standards, these technologies could spread faster than our collective ability to assess their consequences. Consumer apps, commercial ventures, or military uses could emerge long before ethical norms are firmly in place. Decisions made now about governance, accountability, and restraint will shape how widely and how responsibly these tools are used in the future.

In that sense, the question is not whether nonhuman animal communication technologies will affect the wider world, but whether we choose to guide that impact intentionally.

What It Would Mean to Truly Listen

Listening, the report suggests, is not simply a technical achievement. It is a moral practice.

To truly listen to other species may require slowing down rather than rushing ahead, resisting the urge to translate everything into human terms, and accepting that not all knowledge is ours to extract or use. It asks us to recognize that restraint can be a form of respect, and that responsibility grows alongside capability.

At a time when human activity already overwhelms much of the living world, learning to listen differently — with care, humility, and kinship — may be one of the most consequential choices we face. Not because it gives us more control over nature, but because it reminds us that we are part of it.

If these technologies are to help us reconnect with our animal kin, they must be guided by an ethic that honors relationship over domination and listening over mastery.

The Director of New Leaders Initiative on What it Takes to Become a Young Activist

Mona Shomali is the Director of the New Leaders Initiative at Earth Island Institute. Each year the New Leaders Initiative selects six outstanding young environmental leaders and honors them with a Brower Youth Award named after legendary environmentalist David Brower. In addition to honoring and supporting young leaders, Mona is an artist who works with themes such as interracial intimacy and environmental issues. She is also the author of the recently published book Water Mamas. Shomali previously was a professor teaching courses on environmental justice, governance and policy; and indigenous rights in the Amazon at Pace University, The New School and New York University. Mona Shomali was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

ARTY MANGAN: As Director of the New Leaders Initiative, what inspires you?

MONA SHOMALI: I just gave a speech at the 26th Brower Youth Awards and talked about why I love my job. I get to suspend myself in a permanent state of believing what’s possible because I am working with youth who are not jaded yet by the realities that can crush dreams as we become adults. They are immersed in what is possible, what pathways can be taken, what frameworks that have not been seen before, what new structures are possible.

The New Leaders Initiative works with young environmental activists who are not just solo practitioners in a lab, but who inspire and lead other youth, and who are in the space where they’re looking for environmental solutions that maybe only youth can come up with.

ARTY: These are definitely challenging times for everyone but especially youth. You mentioned youth leaders “who are not jaded yet by the realities that can crush dreams as we become adults.” That is such an important perspective that youth are able to embody better than older people, and a perspective that the world desperately needs to overcome pessimism. What other characteristics do you see in young leaders that make them successful?

MONA: Vision. I don’t know if it’s taught or if you come into the world with it. Some people just have a vision, and they work towards manifesting it.

We had a winner this last year, Inaam Chattha, who won for his work around climate anxiety, creating a safe space for youth. He noticed people around him had climate anxiety, and he thought, “We are all dealing with climate anxiety. What if I create an organization that gets people together to share their climate anxiety and comfort one another. They can still be a part of the movement, but they will have support.” I loved his project because he had a vision, and he manifested it from top to bottom, he got other people invested. He did this while being in medical school.

These young leaders have personal lives to deal with. When considering someone for a Brower Youth Award, we like to see that they are an active member of society contributing in a way that is challenging.

For example, if we see someone from a red state that is hostile toward environmental protection policies, and the BYA candidate is fighting and trying to pass resolutions and bills in the legislature, that’s the kind of person we’re looking for. They are overcoming serious barriers, which goes back to being a visionary. They need a vision to work through the barriers. That is a characteristic of many of the winners.

ARTY: Interesting that you mentioned overcoming barriers. I looked back over the last nine years or so of the Brower Youth Awards winners, and found that almost 70 percent are people of color. I have to be careful not to generalize, but in my work also, I’ve been noticing a strong emergence of youth of color who are stepping up as leaders, despite the extra challenges that they typically have.

MONA: I see that as a trend also. The Brower Youth Awards reflect trends in the environmental movement. And right now, I believe that there is a trend of people of color joining the movement in a way that wasn’t the case when I was an environmental studies major in 1997 at UC Santa Cruz.

Then it was pretty much exclusively a white department. We had one Mexican-American, there was one other Iranian-American besides me, and that was it; everyone else was white.

Because of urban issues coming into the fold, such as clean water, clean air, and because the movement is encompassing more than just conservation, yes, we’re seeing voices of youth of color emerging in leadership roles.

ARTY: You mentioned climate anxiety. It must be so difficult for a young person to visualize a positive future in the face of the multiple crises happening in the world. Recently you brought together some of your former winners and did a retreat dealing with climate anxiety. What came up during that time?

MONA: The person who led the workshop was a therapist. One of the things that she imparted on us was that climate anxiety, like any other anxiety, has to be dealt with as anxiety. She had a lot of methods and techniques that were clinical that I won’t do justice getting into. But from the youth I’ve spoken to who have less climate anxiety, they are the ones who are not tackling “the world.” They’re tackling their community, their neighborhood, their street, their local watershed. I think those folks are able, not to completely overcome, but to mitigate climate anxiety with local action. Otherwise it is overwhelming. If you look at world climate events, it’s really daunting. So, I think it’s good to make the aperture smaller and just think about what you can do locally where you live. You can get bigger from there, but I think starting where you are in the community you’re in is one way to not be as overwhelmed by anxiety.

ARTY: I work with the Bioneers Young Leaders Program, and that’s one of our themes. As a young person, if you look in any direction, the world needs help, so what are your passions and how can you use those passions to be an activist to help healing. And if you are able to find that path, then in spite of all the craziness that’s going on all around you, that will be your best opportunity to have a fulfilling life.

MONA: Yes. And I think you said something that I normally say when I talk to youth at the career days that I’m doing a UC Berkeley networking event with current students. When I’m in those environments, my advice is to get really good at something and then contribute that to the environmental movement. If you’re a really great accountant, become an accountant for an environmental group. If you’re a really great teacher, teach environmental policy or environmental studies. If you’re a really great litigator, become an environmental lawyer. If you’re really good with your hands, become a biologist and help with species conservation.

There’s really nothing that can’t help the environmental movement. I think what you’ve said that really resonates with me is find your passion, and get really good at it and then apply it to environmentalism.

ARTY: The multiple crises that we live with now is also the opportunity for people to plug in and become skillful, as you say, and help heal.

MONA: Yeah, I mean, we need everybody.

ARTY: Right. Another aspect of your work is the fellowship for UC Berkeley students. Who are those students and what do they do?

MONA: That’s actually one of my favorite parts of my job. I work with undergraduate and graduate UC Berkeley students who are interested in program management and research. They get real life experience working with a non-profit employer to produce a final project deliverable. 

For example, starting in January, we will be doing a fellowship with law students for climate accountability, which is an Earth Island project. Six students have been selected and they will be researching fossil fuel companies and building a database, and tracking. I’m really looking forward to the project. It’s really exciting for me because I get to sit in and work with the client contacts.

In addition to the fellowship, we also do a poetry slam for environmental justice every year in collaboration with the Rhoades Foundation for communities and the environment. We usually have about 30 to 40 poets that come to us through Rhoades’ program called New Voices are Rising, which is an environmental justice fellowship. I teach a poetry workshop, and then we workshop poems and perform them on stage with a microphone and a DJ. The slam is a real party, and lots of people come.

ARTY: Earth Island Institute was founded by the legendary environmentalist David Brower, who among many other accomplishments, is credited with preventing the damming of the Grand Canyon. I have a couple of quotes from Brower that I would ask you to reflect on in any way you like. The first quote is: “I’m always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.”

MONA: As we age, we see more and more barriers and we start to shut down. Our dreams become dampened or less clear. When someone is young, if they can get encouragement, support and scaffolding, and foundational skills then I think it’s harder for their dreams to die.

ARTY: As an artist, how do you think people, as they age, prevent themselves from closing down?

MONA: It’s interesting that you ask that, because I actually think because I’m an artist, I never stopped believing in my dreams. I think artists can remain childlike in many ways. I have a few quotes. One of the quotes is: “Art moves the culture forward.” And “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” So I think art is a part of pushing what’s new, what’s coming down the pipe, not being scared of it, embracing progression in society. I think art is about embracing change.

One thing I’ve noticed as I get older, some of my more serious friends are not as excited about change; they’re not as excited to try on a new hat, try on a new thought, try on a new paradigm shift. I’m so happy I have so many creative friends because I do think that sets us apart.

I think creativity is really central in keeping your dreams alive. Everyone can be creative. Creativity and keeping your dreams alive do go together.

ARTY: My last David Brower quote, and this is consistent with what we talked about in terms of understanding what your passion is and using that to heal the world and heal yourself, is: “Have fun saving the world or you’re just going to depress yourself.”

MONA: I actually struggle with the term “saving the world” because I do think sometimes that lends itself to a bit of Narcissism. I encourage my youth to make a paradigm shift. I think saving the world as a dream can be a little bit problematic. So I usually steer the youth away from that term because of some of the undercurrents of being the savior and saving.

I like to think that the Earth will self-correct, it just might self-correct in a way that is not inhabitable for humans. I don’t think we’re saving anything except our own species; I do think that the Earth has the power to self-correct.

ARTY: What about the part of having fun with your activism or you will become depressed? The statistics of young people, of their anxiety and depression and suicide rates are troubling.

MONA: Most of my friends have teenage kids, so I have a lot of teenagers in my life outside of my job. I think social media has created a lot of issues. There’s a lot of good that’s come out of social media, but I do think it is engineering a very isolated type of person. It’s very hard to have fun in isolation. I believe that social media is basically creating a new type of human, and that concerns me because sometimes when I see teens in a room, they’re not talking to each other, they’re all on their phones.

For leadership week, we bring together this year’s awardees before the Brower Youth Awards ceremony and do activities where we have to take the phone away. We go kayaking and we take the phones so that they don’t get wet. We do a ropes course and we take the phones so they don’t get caught up in the harness and the ropes. We look for activities that are naturally phone free because I’ve seen a lot of isolation from social media use. We jam pack those days with workshops and activities and hikes and meals and discussions. We also have an environmental action through a writing workshop taught by a woman who’s a four-time writer for an HBO series.

Muskan, a Brower Youth Award winner from a few years ago, said it was the best week of her life. This last year, Inaam said that it was one of the best weeks of his life. We have consistently good feedback about leadership week, so we pour more and more resources into it every year.

ARTY: Besides your work honoring and supporting youth leadership, you are an artist and, just recently, the author of a book.

MONA: The book, Water Mamas, is a work of climate fiction, but it is loosely based on my own work doing human rights advocacy in the Amazon. About 20 years ago, I was a case researcher on Sarayaku versus Ecuador. The Indigenous community of Sarayaku sued Ecuador in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for allowing illegal drilling on their land without free, prior and informed consent. After that, I continued to work in the Amazon.

After the Sarayaku, I worked with the Macushi on human rights. I taught a summer abroad program called Indigenous Human Rights in the Amazon. We learned, for example, about how eco-tourism can be a way for Indigenous communities to actualize their rights, their rights to resources, rights to having agency over their lives.

In the book I wanted to explore a tension that I had witnessed, which was environmental science versus Indigenous spirituality. I saw personally that Indigenous mythology was not environmental conservation, but rather it was following spiritual practices and laws that result in good ecosystem management. I wanted to write about how mythology leads to good ecosystem management and can go head-to-head with environmental science.

The book takes place in the not-so-distant future. The Amazon, the Earth’s lungs, are failing, and our lead protagonist is a UN representative who is trying to secure consent from Indigenous communities to start a rain seeding program, which does exist today. It’s used in California. The biggest program is in China. It’s a cloud technology that provides rain. But in the Amazon, there are human rights laws, so the protagonist has to get consent, and some of the tribes do not want to give consent because they fear the manmade rain will hurt their Water Mamas, which are the spirits that live in the forest. So they’re worried about their mythology and their spirituality. The story is a clash of worldviews, Western science versus Indigenous ancestral wisdom with the fate of global climate hanging in the balance.

I used to teach a course in which we talked about the role of culture and natural resource management. I talked about how science is an organized system of knowledge. Western science happens to be the most politically powerful, but there are other valid ways of knowing from cultures around the world. UNESCO, an arm of the UN, recognizes Indigenous knowledge and tries to record as much of it as they can.

How a Healing Crisis Led to Regenerative Agriculture and the Launch of an Ancient Grain Food Business

Crystal Manuel and her husband Jody both come from multigenerational farm families. A debilitating health crisis hit Crystal in the prime of her life, and her remarkable healing journey made them reconsider the risks of exposure to agrochemicals. They transitioned to organic and ultimately regenerative farming practices growing a variety of grains and pulses such as emmer wheat, Spelt, Kamut, Beluga lentils, Red Crimson lentils, Purple Prairie Barley, and Black Chickpeas on their 7400-acre farm which is a mix of cropland and pasture. In the healing process, they also adopted healthier eating habits. Their dedication to eating and growing nutritious whole foods inspired them to start a small business, Gruff Grains, producing Farro, a high protein, nutrient-dense ancient grain. Farrow is the food, Emmer is how it is referred to as a crop in the field. Emmer wheat, one of the earliest domesticated crops, has been cultivated for over 10,000 years and was a dietary staple in the Middle East, Egypt, and Europe. Gruff Grains won a NEXTY Award at the Expo East food show and Crystal won a Maxwell/Hanrahan food award in 2024 for being a whole food educator and organic food entrepreneur.

ARTY MANGAN: How did your health crisis change your approach to farming and impact your life in general?

CRYSTAL MANUEL: I had always been healthy. At the time we’d been married for a few years and had two young children, I got super sick. It happened fairly quickly and unexpectedly, but the doctor I worked with later said it actually took a long time of exposure to toxins to build up to that point.

That sickness literally changed everything. Initially, I was misdiagnosed with adult-onset asthma, but I knew that it was a wrong diagnosis. They wanted me to come back for testing three days after my initial misdiagnosis. I was back home and feeling really sick with a variety of symptoms. I had lost a half-inch swath of hair all around the perimeter of my head. It was so weird. It just fell out. And I had lost 35 pounds in a month. My heart rate was sometimes up to 160 beats per minute. It was complete insanity. I was so short of breath, but that was because my heart was beating so fast. To me it wasn’t making sense.

The day before I was to go to the doctor for the second time for testing, I had nursed the baby and I was laying her down for a nap. I walked down our hallway and I noticed this book on the shelf that had sat there for about three years that my hippie aunt had given it to us as a wedding gift. When she gave it to me, she said: “I know that you don’t know that you need this right now, but you have to promise me you’re not going to toss it into a yard sale box.” For the last 30 years, my aunt had preached that food is medicine, and everybody thought she was crazy. She is my favorite aunt, so I was definitely going to keep the book.

I grabbed that book off the shelf, and read the title, the Prescription for Nutritional Healing, and I thought, “I wonder if I could find some help in this book.”

So, I sat down with the book, with my 2-year-old on my lap, and I started flipping through the pages. On each page is one disease. It talked about the symptoms, and about food and supplements that you could take, and about all the things to avoid. I just sat, flipping pages, looking for my symptoms. On page 211, I found Grave’s Disease, and it described the exact symptoms I had.

The next thing that happened was really wild. I was looking through the section on which supplements to take and which foods to eat to avoid Graves’ disease. The first food listed was cabbage. I can’t even explain to you what happened, but I had an instantaneous craving for cabbage that was unbelievable. It was crazy. I had to have cabbage.

I called Jody and I said, “I know this sounds insane, but I need you to go to town as soon as you can and buy a couple of cabbages and bring them back as quick as you can.” He just started laughing. He thought, “This is the craziest thing you’ve ever asked me to buy for you.”

So he zips to town and he comes back home, and by the time he gets home, I already had a pan of water steaming, the cutting board was out, and I whacked the cabbage in half, and chunked it up, and tossed it into the steaming water. I literally consumed an entire cabbage about 15 minutes later. I have never, to this day, been more satiated from any meal I’ve ever consumed. I’ve had quite a lot of good food fortunately, doing what we do, but that meal was extraordinary. It just felt so good.

That entire experience was a turning point in my life because I realized in that moment that food was medicine. After doing some research, I found that cabbage contains compounds that are very similar to the synthetic components that go in the medication for Graves’ disease. The cabbage is more gentle in the way it responds, but it does the same thing internally that thyroid medications do in terms of calming everything down that’s interconnected with that disease, which is your pituitary gland and your thyroid.

So I ate cabbage, after cabbage, after cabbage. There was not anything in this whole world for several months that sounded better to me than cabbage. It got to the point where I had to force myself to eat other whole foods, but really, all I just wanted was cabbage.

I went back to the doctor the next day, and I don’t know why, but I let him do the test for asthma. He was just so adamant that’s what it was, and I knew it was wrong. The test involved taking some blood. I said to him, “I don’t think I have asthma; I think I have Graves’ disease.” He laughed and said, “You do not have Graves’ disease.” “Well, you’re taking blood anyway, go ahead and test me for it.” So he did.

After the appointment. I drove 15 minutes back to the ranch. By the time I got home, there was already a message on my machine from the lab that said you did test positive for Graves’ disease; we need you to come in immediately. I thought, no, I just diagnosed myself so I’m not going to go back to you.

I ended up seeing a few doctors, and they wanted to remove my thyroid. They said you are advanced, we’ve got to do something quick. Jody pleaded, “Please just listen to them.” I was so sick, but I just kept saying no.

When I asked the doctors what causes an autoimmune disease like Graves’, they said they didn’t know. They wanted to use radioactive iodine to kill off part of my thyroid, or remove it completely. Either way, I would need synthetic medication to mimic the job of the thyroid. But I knew that the cabbage was working, so I said no.

I finally found a doctor who agreed that food can be used as medicine, but everything he knew about it was self-taught. He said, “I didn’t learn anything about this in medical school, but I have studied on my own. I do think there’s something to it, but, I must say, that I’ve never had anybody walk into my office with a holistic nutrition book and claim that cabbage was part of the cure. But I see you’re determined, so if you do as much as you can with food, I’ll do as little as I have to with medicine, and we’re going to see if we can pull this thing off.  But here’s the thing: it took you a long time to get sick. I know that you think it happened quickly, but it builds up and when you get to the tipping point, the symptoms appear. To overcome this, if it’s even possible, it’s going to take a while.”

Crystal and Jody with their son on their ranch in Montana

He was right about that. It took a little over two years before I was normal again. But I did continually get better, but it was very incremental.

I was super curious about autoimmune diseases and what caused them. I felt that removing my thyroid wasn’t going to fix anything except for an over-active thyroid, but I still wouldn’t understand why I was sick. What would go wrong next if I don’t try to address the root cause?

When I did a search on what causes an autoimmune disease, it listed agrochemicals as one of the known culprits. There were other things on the list as well, but I knew that I had had a lot of exposure to that sort of thing in our farming environment.

We began deep diving into the research, and we learned about the correlation between food and chemicals and pharmaceutical companies. So we immediately began making incremental changes on how we were farming. It took a handful of years to completely transition to organic because when you convert to an organic system, you have to have a three-year transition period on any ground that has been sprayed. So we broke up some virgin ground and had fields that were certifiable right away, but we had to wait for the fields that had been chemically treated in the past to go through the transition period. I got sick in 1997 and by 2007, we had converted everything over to organic.

ARTY: That’s an incredible story in so many different ways. I’m skeptical about Western medicine as well. But it is good to hear that there are doctors who do integrative medicine and will customize a healing regime that’s right for you. So, you changed your diet. You’re not exposing yourself and your family to agrochemicals. How are you feeling?

CRYSTAL: Amazing. After it took those two years to heal, I finally went to the doctor to do blood tests, and he said, “You made it. Everything is perfect. We can stop all medications.” And I’ve never taken them since. That was in 1999.

I can never say that I absolutely know that agrochemicals are what caused my disease, but I do know that I had a ton of exposure to them and that they are linked to Graves’ disease.

A few years after all of that, my Mom encouraged me to get a medical checkup. I was feeling really healthy but I made an appointment anyway. The doctor looked at my chart and said, “I had no idea that you were so sick with Graves’ disease. Whoever did your surgery did an incredible job. Usually you can see the scar.” I just started laughing. I told her that I didn’t have surgery. She said, “I’ve never seen anybody so sick not do surgery for this.” She was concerned and recommended a blood test. A week later she called and said, “What I learned in medical school versus what your test results are saying don’t really match up. I know that you did the medications, but there had to have been something else for you to overcome this. There must be something that’s missing from your chart. What was it? Do you have any idea?” I just started laughing, and said, “Well, yeah, it was cabbage.”

ARTY: That’s such a wonderful story, with a wonderful outcome. Congratulations on the strength of your convictions. Talk about the turning point when you decided to change the way you and Jody farmed.

CRYSTAL: We knew that if we were going to stay in agriculture, we had to grow food organically. That was a pretty bold statement for us to make because at the time, my father-in-law was also working the farm, and he thought we were crazy. None of this made sense to him, and none of our neighbors were organic farmers. You learn when you talk to people who farm organically that that’s usually the case – their neighbors, their family members just don’t understand why somebody would go through what you go through to farm organically because in a commercialized system, everything is easy. There’s a spray or a synthetic fertilizer for any problem that you might have.

My father-in-law thought we were making a very unwise decision. He literally said, “This is never going to work and you’re going to go broke.” But we had to give it a try or otherwise stop farming altogether.

So we went to an organic farming convention, and we ended up meeting the most incredible, outside-the-box thinking people: farmers, gardeners, orchardists. Everyone was so passionate about what they were doing and were so willing to share information. They cared about people, and health, and the food system, and all the things that had been resonating with us. So we knew we had found our tribe.

We started growing lentils for the Timeless food company. Lentils are a legume that naturally put nitrogen in the soil. Liz Carlisle wrote a book called The Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America and we were one of the farms she wrote about. The book got publicity and we started getting calls from companies like Dave’s Killer Bread and Annie’s (the organic mac and cheese company).

Annie’s sent out a whole team of people. At that point we were farming regeneratively. They knew that the regenerative was going to be a trend in the market, and they wanted to be on board with it because of the climate-friendly aspects.

For several years prior to all of that, I had become passionate about education on the health benefits of whole food, so I co-wrote a series of classes. Talking with these companies made me realize I wanted to do something different and I’d always had this entrepreneurial spirit. I told Jody that if we started our own food company, we probably could educate the consumer audience better than other companies because we live and breathe it every day on the farm. That’s how the concept for the Gruff Grains came about. Our tagline is “Nutrient-dense ancient grains for your family’s health.”

We had reached out to Montana’s oldest food company, Cream of the West, a hot cereal company. They started in 1914 by farmers and ranchers who wanted to get healthy food into the hands of people. They agreed to co-pack for us.

With the help of a USDA grant, we developed our product. About six months into the process, we found out Cream of the West–a legacy Montana-based company producing whole grain hot cereals–wanted to sell the company. We panicked; we didn’t want to lose our co-packer. They asked us if we wanted to buy the company. I thought it was crazy–it was a fully functioning company three-and-a-half hours from the ranch. But Jody decided we should do it. So we bought the company.

Jody in the wheat field

 ARTY:  So now you and Jody are growing Farro (which when it is growing in the field is called Emmer) and process it into grits and sell it under the Gruff Grains label.

CRYSTAL: We refer to Gruff as a mission with a brand. What I want to do with that company is explain to people what’s happening in the food industry, specifically concerning grains in the US because that category has been adulterated.

At the turn of the century, when industrial steel mills, which were more efficient, replaced stone mills, they began separating out the bran and the germ from the endosperm. Every kernel of wheat has three components – the bran, the germ, and the endosperm. To make white flour, you strip out the bran and the germ, but the problem with doing that is you take out more than 20 naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, all the healthy oils and fats, and all of the fiber. When they began doing that, people started getting sick with all kinds of diseases – beriberi, Pellagra, anemia, and other things.

In order to remedy that situation, they made a very profitable but unhealthy decision; they created five synthetic vitamins, and added some iron, and put it into white flour so that they would have something to say on the nutrition label, and they could take care of the symptoms of some of these diseases that were arising due to the lack of nutrients in white flour.

Today, there are a lot of people with serious gluten sensitivities who are avoiding wheat altogether and going gluten free. But, it’s not that grain is dangerous in and of itself. If it’s ancient and if it’s grown organically, and if it’s a whole food, most people do not have any problem with it. In fact we have all kinds of testimonies from people who have tried our product–our ancient grain grits made from Farro–saying, “Thank you for helping us understand this. We can enjoy grain again, and we understand how to make better choices.” As a company, this is the kind of information we want to share with people.

Sharing that kind of information is what pumps us up. People are consuming loads of enriched flour; it’s in everything: cold cereals, crackers, fast foods, pizza. It’s almost impossible to avoid enriched flour.

Because everything natural has been stripped out of it, it causes spikes in blood sugar. The nutrients that actually aid in the digestion of the grain have been removed in white flour. Conventionally grown wheat is sprayed with chemicals which end up in the food supply and wreak havoc on the gut microbiome as well.

Enriched flour is linked to a very long list of modern diseases, but very few people are making the correlation that if they switch to whole grains they could achieve better health.

ARTY: Absolutely. White flour is pretty close to white sugar in the way the body metabolizes it, both have empty calories that drive diet-related disease.

CRYSTAL: People are starting to figure that part out, but oftentimes they think they have to avoid grain completely. But, for most people, that’s not necessary. Gruff Grains is grits made from Farro, an ancient wheat traced back to Roman times. For people who want to learn more about Farro and how to cook it, we have recipes on our website.

Our mission with Gruff Grains is to bring this ancient, whole grain to the marketplace with the highest certification possible, that’s why we got the Regenerative Organic certification (ROC). We also want it to be part of the farm-to-fork movement so it has to be traceable back to the farm where it was grown so we can tell the farmer’s story. Most grain goes through a mill and gets mixed together with grains from many different farms.

We also want people to understand what it takes to farm regeneratively. Since we got the Regenerative Organic Certification, we’ve begun working with a number of other food companies. We’re the only ROC farm in the world that grows Kernza, a perennial grain that we contract exclusively with Patagonia Provisions to grow. We’ve also sold crops to Purely Elizabeth’s granola company, and a handful of others. It’s definitely been an interesting journey.

Learn more about Gruff Grains and Farro  

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Colorado Mountain Becomes the First Mountain in the U.S. to Own Itself

On June 7, 2025, a quiet but revolutionary shift in law and land took place in Colorado. A Mountain in the San Luis Valley became the first mountain in the United States to legally own itself. Through Sacred Contract’s Land That Owns Itself program, the mountain now holds its own deed, protected from future development or extraction.

The project is part of a growing global movement to rethink humanity’s relationship with nature. While Rights of Nature laws have gained traction worldwide, the recent project represents a new frontier: ecosystems themselves holding legal title to the land they comprise.

One of the legal architects behind this groundbreaking work is Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER) and a founding member of Sacred Contract, a partnership between CDER, Regenerative Earth, and the Center for Ethical Land Transition. Linzey drafted the world’s first Rights of Nature law in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in 2006, and later consulted with Ecuador’s constitutional convention to help write Rights of Nature into the country’s 2008 constitution. His decades of work have reshaped how communities and governments think about law, property, and the natural world.

We spoke with Linzey about how the concept of land that owns itself came to be, what makes this project unique, and the potential future of this legal experiment.

Bioneers: Thomas, could you provide some background on how the concept of Land That Owns Itself evolved, and how it led to the recent project?

Thomas Linzey: We’ve been involved in Rights of Nature work for a long time. Back in 2006, we drafted the first Rights of Nature law and later worked with Ecuador’s constitutional convention to embed it into their national constitution. Over the years, the work has evolved. About ten years ago, we began experimenting with conservation easements. In places where local governments weren’t willing to pass Rights of Nature laws, we helped landowners incorporate legal rights of ecosystems into their deeds. That way, the land title itself would recognize Rights of Nature, not just the law.

But some landowners pushed us further. They asked: Even if the deed recognizes Rights of Nature, isn’t the land still owned by humans? What if nature could actually own itself? At first, we thought it was impossible. Western law is fundamentally built on the idea that nature is property. That system is so ingrained that people rarely question it.

Still, we took the challenge seriously and spent about a year researching how to create a legal structure that treated ecosystems not as property but as their own titleholders. Out of that came the Land That Owns Itself concept — ecosystems legally holding title to the land they comprise.

In 2023, we tested the idea in Washington State with a two-acre forest parcel. That project succeeded, and if you look in the county deed book, you’ll see the forest itself listed as holding its own deed.

The recent project in Colorado builds on that proof of concept. It represents the first full expression of the project; not only does the land own itself, but it is also guided by Indigenous and local guardians in a majority-led Indigenous council. That makes it a more complete model of how this approach can work in practice, with a majority of the guardians having an ancestral relationship to the Land through their indigenous lineage.

Bioneers: Do you see this concept of Land That Owns Itself as the future of Rights of Nature?

Linzey: Yes. I believe this model has even greater potential than the original Rights of Nature work. For me, it’s also personal. Over the last 30 years, I’ve heard many landowners say, I don’t see myself as the owner, I see myself as a steward. That’s a beautiful sentiment, but in reality, the law says you own that land. You hold legal control. And when you die, it often ends up in the hands of someone who doesn’t share your values. Sometimes it goes to the state and is sold to the highest bidder, and then exploited.

So while it’s nice to think of ourselves as stewards, the legal system doesn’t recognize that. It still positions people as dominant and nature as property. Until we change that fundamental property relationship, the problems remain.

That’s why this model matters. It doesn’t just change how people think, it gives them a legal alternative. If you believe you’re a steward, this makes it real: The land owns itself, and you step into a genuine role as guardian or trustee. It replaces myth with legal reality.

It also expands more quickly than traditional lawmaking. Individual landowners can adopt it for their parcels, and municipalities could even create transition funds to help shift land into this structure. We’re already hearing from landowners with thousands of acres and from older people without heirs who want to protect their land this way.

When it comes to Indigenous sovereignty, the implications are profound. Think about Land Back. Colonizers took Native land and imposed a Western property system — titles, deeds, lines on maps. Today, when land is returned, it often comes back through that same colonized system. It’s essentially saying: We broke it, but we’ll give it back to you on the condition that you accept it in the legal form that we imposed on it.

Land That Owns Itself offers a different path. Many of our clients are tribal governments and Indigenous communities. For them, this model can feel more aligned with their philosophies because it decolonizes the property framework. The land isn’t “owned” in the Western sense. Instead, ecosystems hold title, and Indigenous communities step into guardianship roles. That gives them real decision-making authority without requiring ownership — a concept historically foreign to many Indigenous traditions.

We fully support Land Back as it exists today. It’s far better than the status quo. But we see Land That Owns Itself as a more philosophically consistent way of decolonizing property, restoring sovereignty, and recognizing nature’s inherent rights.

Bioneers: So how does this work in practice, and how will it be sustained over the long term?

Linzey: When the entity is created to hold the deed, it’s the ecosystems themselves — the flora, fauna, climate, and water — joining together to create that legal entity. The ecosystems themselves are the legal members of the entity, with humans then serving as their voices or guardians.

Those guardians sign a legal document that spells out their duties and obligations. When the Indigenous-led guardianship council signed that document for the “mountain that owns itself”  in Colorado three months ago, they agreed to very specific responsibilities: recognizing the Rights of Nature, acting in the best interests of the ecosystems, and avoiding any action that would infringe on those rights.

To add another safeguard, we placed an easement on the land before the transfer. That easement sets additional limits on what the guardians can do, so even if they stray from their responsibilities in generations ahead, the land remains protected.

Looking ahead, new guardians will need to step in over time, and an endowment is essential to sustain the work. The vision isn’t just to freeze the land as it is today, but to restore it to a healthier state. Some past activities disrupted the mountain’s ecological balance, and broader restoration projects are still needed, from rewilding to repairing ecological damage.

That’s why Sacred Contract is currently working on a $5 million fundraising campaign to establish a permanent endowment. The fund will support the guardians in their stewardship and ensure that resources are always available for the restoration and long-term care of the land.

Bioneers: Looking to the future, how do you see this concept growing?

Linzey: What excites me is how this model can extend beyond the land parcel, which changes ownership. If a river has recognized rights within one property, in theory, we can enforce those rights upstream against owners outside the original deed. We call that extra-jurisdictional enforcement. It’s a way for small parcels to exert much larger influence over state permits, fracking operations, factory farms — anything that affects the ecosystems tied to that land.

The bigger challenge is cultural. In this country, property ownership is so deeply ingrained that few people even question the concept. For this work to take hold, the critique of property along with the alternative vision we’re building has to grow alongside these projects.

That said, the future is already taking shape. In Colorado, we have two additional parcels near the mountain that we hope to fold into the same structure. The broader vision is what we call “nodes.” The first node is the San Luis Valley, where the “mountain that owns itself” sits at the northeastern edge. The long-term idea is a patchwork of land across the valley, so instead of just a mountain that owns itself, you have a valley that owns itself.

Beyond Colorado, interest is spreading. We’ve been approached by landowners in New York, Vermont, Costa Rica, and the UK. In England, lawyers are already working to replicate the model, and we’re funding a feasibility study there with three pilot projects — one of them over a thousand acres.

The goal is to establish the concept here, then adapt and scale it in other regions. In that sense, the “mountain that owns itself”  is not the endpoint, but rather the beginning of something much larger.

Using the Law to Challenge Big Plastic

Written by Scott Hochberg, General Counsel and Litigation Director at Earth Island Institute

Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental crises of our time, with devastating consequences for ecosystems, wildlife, and human health, which are only getting worse. Rivers, oceans, and beaches all over the world are mired in unrelenting plastic trash, as the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks enters the Earth’s waterways every day. New research verifies that the amount of plastic needed to kill seabirds, turtles, and marine mammals is surprisingly small. And scientists have discovered that microplastics — nearly ubiquitous in soil and water — have been found in human blood, brains, and placentas, and are increasingly linked to serious health consequences. The climate implications of these trends are staggering, as 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Disturbingly, plastic production is set to quadruple by 2050.

Despite growing awareness around the havoc that plastic is wreaking, corporate accountability remains elusive. One reason is that the plastic supply chain is long: It runs from the fossil fuel companies that extract raw materials and chemical processors to consumer-facing companies that package products and, ultimately, to the waste management and recycling facilities that handle plastic’s afterlife. This diverse chain of actors makes it difficult to tackle the problem head-on.

In addition, the biggest corporations have been running a decades-long campaign to manufacture and market single-use plastic products. These same companies have championed recycling, despite the fact that less than 10 percent of plastics are recycled globally, even if they are placed in the correct bins. The amount that is turned into new products is even lower. Simply put, recycling is a fantasy used to justify the production and consumption of ever more plastic. Most of it gets burned or landfilled, or escapes as litter.

Given this dire situation, the law has an important role to play in holding the plastic industry accountable. Litigation, when tied to effective social movements and advocacy, has the power to stop companies from making misleading and deceptive statements about the sustainability and recyclability of their products. In addition, lawsuits can highlight the extent of the plastic crisis and the lengths to which companies will go to avoid taking responsibility. Earth Island Institute, in partnership with Plastic Pollution Coalition, has drawn on these legal tools and is starting to see the fruits of a multi-year, multi-lawsuit campaign to hold Big Plastic accountable.

Stopping Greenwashing in the Plastic Water Bottle Industry

The plastic water bottle industry is particularly misleading when it comes to claims about its products. In 2021, Earth Island Institute filed a lawsuit against the Coca-Cola Company for its false portrayal of itself as a sustainable company when, in reality, it generates more plastic pollution than any other corporation in the world. The lawsuit relies on the District of Columbia’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA), a law that prohibits a wide variety of deceptive business practices. If successful, the case would prevent Coca-Cola from falsely advertising its business as sustainable, and would hopefully caution other companies to avoid making similar claims. In 2024, a DC appeals court found that Earth Island Institute sufficiently pled that Coca-Cola’s claims are in violation of the CPPA, which allowed the case to proceed. Importantly, the court’s ruling expanded the ability of nonprofits to challenge similar claims going forward.

Since then, Earth Island has confronted similar deceptive marketing practices by Aquafina, Evian, Fiji, Core Hydration, and Just Water. We aim to hold each of these brands (and their parent companies) accountable for the climate, health, and environmental harms that millions of disposable bottles are causing each year. 

Challenging Big Plastic

In addition to greenwashing, plastic producers have contributed to the plastic crisis by enticing consumers to buy their products while knowing that recycling facilities cannot handle the millions of tons of plastic products they produce.

In 2020, Earth Island filed the first major lawsuit of its kind against Crystal Geyser, Clorox, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé USA, Mars, Danone, Mondeléz International, Colgate-Palmolive, and Procter & Gamble for polluting California waterways, coasts, and oceans with millions of tons of plastic packaging. The case asserted that these companies promote their products as recyclable when many are non-recyclable and when the current system is not set up to handle the volume of plastic they produce, which ends up as litter or landfill waste. California alone spends an estimated $428 million per year to clean up this pollution. Similar to landmark lawsuits against lead paint companies and opioid manufacturers, this suit argues that plastic companies are responsible for creating a “public nuisance,” and that they should have to pay to clean it up.   

The case is scheduled for trial in 2026, but it’s already sending ripples across the country. The State of California filed a similar suit against ExxonMobil last year, and other lawsuits have been launched in New York and Los Angeles County, with more likely to come.

A New Wave of Creative Litigation  

To tackle the ever-deepening plastic nuisance, we need a multi-lawsuit strategy that uses novel legal theories to hold corporations accountable for their plastic harms. In addition to our foundational environmental laws that protect clean air and water and regulate toxic chemicals, there are other creative legal avenues to challenge the plastic industry, such as tort law and consumer protection law. The lawsuits described above are using these alternate pathways to seek justice.

This is an urgent moment to act, as the plastics crisis is getting worse, not better. These lawsuits have survived multiple efforts to quash them, signaling early success and validating their legal strategies. Earth Island will continue to use all legal tools available to hold this industry accountable.

Join us in this fight. Together, we are turning the tide against plastic pollution.

To follow our work, visit the Earth Island Advocates webpage and subscribe to Earth Island Journal, which covers news from our court cases.   

What Our Clothing Leaves Behind: A Deep Dive Into Microfiber Pollution

Microfibers — tiny threads shed from our clothing, many of which are plastic — have quietly become one of the most pervasive forms of pollution in the world. They drift through the air, wash into waterways, settle into soils, and accumulate in wildlife and human tissues. Yet many people have never heard of them, and until recently, even scientists struggled to detect them.

5 Gyres is helping shift that landscape. Through new research, public engagement, and policy advocacy, the organization is uncovering how microfibers move through the environment and identifying solutions — both large and small — that can meaningfully reduce their impact.

To learn more about what the science is showing and what comes next, we spoke with Dr. Lisa Erdle, who leads 5 Gyres’ microfiber research, and Andra Janieks, who translates that science into action-oriented communication.

Understanding the Problem

Bioneers: Why is the microfiber issue so urgent and also so under the radar compared to other plastics?

Dr. Lisa Erdle: Microfibers have flown under the radar mostly because we literally couldn’t see them for a long time. Early methods for studying microplastics used mesh sizes that were just too coarse — these tiny fibers simply slipped through. It wasn’t until around 2010 that researchers in the UK examined smaller size fractions near a sewage outflow and suddenly found mostly microfibers. And the plastics they found matched the plastics in our clothing: polyester, nylon, all these textile fibers.

Now that our methods have improved, we’re finding fibers everywhere — sediment, fish, water, air. And also in us. They’re incredibly lightweight, so they travel huge distances through the atmosphere. That’s likely why they’re showing up in remote places like the Arctic, the Antarctic, and even on the top of Mount Everest.

Andra Janieks: On the consumer side, I think microfibers have stayed under the radar because people don’t associate clothing with plastic. When most folks think of plastic pollution, they picture bottles, straws, all the obvious stuff. But things like nylon and spandex are plastic, and most people don’t realize that more than 60% of our clothing today is made from plastic fibers.

Bioneers: How does this issue compare to some of the plastic pollutants, like plastic bottles, that consumers tend to be more aware of?

Lisa: The big difference is exposure. Our latest research — and work from other scientists — shows that we’re exposed to far more microplastics through the air we breathe than through the food we eat or the water we drink. One study found that during a 30-minute meal, more than ten times as many airborne microplastics settled on a plate than were present in the seafood itself.

When we do air sampling, we’re finding that a huge portion of what’s floating around is microfibers. They settle into city dust, wash into waterways, or we inhale them directly.

Those fibers can get into our lungs, our blood, even the olfactory bulb — the channels connecting our noses to our brain. So our exposure from the air is much higher than the microplastics from bottled water or food. It’s a completely different scale.

Bioneers: Your research has already identified key pollution pathways, such as washing, drying, and wearing textiles. What new or unexpected pathways are emerging? Which ones worry you most?

Lisa: One of the most surprising findings has been just how many microfibers are in the air — far more than we previously understood. We’ve known for years that washing a single load of laundry can release millions of fibers. Those go to wastewater treatment plants, where some are trapped in sludge and end up in agricultural soils, and some go straight into waterways.

But newer research shows that stormwater, rain gardens, and especially city dust are full of microfibers. And that led us to dryers. When we dry our clothes, dryers emit large amounts of microfibers directly into the atmosphere. This is still a very new area of research, but it’s becoming clear that dryers are a major source of airborne microfibers, at least in regions where dryers are commonly used.

Everyday wear is also a significant pathway; friction and movement cause fabrics to shed constantly. So it’s not just washing. It’s washing and drying and simply living in our clothes. All of that sheds fibers into the air, where they travel, settle out as dust, and eventually enter ecosystems or our bodies.

What We Know — and Don’t Yet Know — About Microfiber Health Risks

Bioneers: What do we know so far about the potential impacts of microfibers on human health and ecosystems?

Lisa: We know the most about how microfibers affect ecosystems, because that’s where the earliest research has been focused. When microfibers enter wildlife, they can trigger a wide range of negative effects: changes in feeding behavior, reduced growth, lower survival, and signs of stress in different organs. The chemicals associated with microfibers can also be endocrine disruptors, so we see things like oxidative stress or changes in the hepato-somatic index — essentially, the size of an animal’s liver relative to its body, which is a clear indicator that something is wrong.

When it comes to human health, the research is newer, but the exposure pathways are becoming clearer. We’re now finding microfibers in many different human tissues: placenta, liver, kidneys, lungs, and even parts of the brain. These fibers are so small that they can move between tissues, and their shape means they can become entangled and harder for the body to clear.

So while we know a lot about ecological impacts, the human health side is still developing — and frankly, that’s what concerns me most. We’re seeing fibers in places they shouldn’t be, and early lab experiments show a range of harmful effects on cells and organisms. The big questions now are: how much are we being exposed to, how long do these fibers stay in the body, and what the long-term consequences might be. There’s still a lot we don’t know, but what we’re already seeing is enough to pay close attention.

Connecting Science to People

Bioneers: Andra, your role focuses on turning complicated science, such as this microfiber research, into something people can act on. What’s your approach to helping people feel empowered rather than overwhelmed?

Andra: There’s so much doom and gloom in the environmental space. When people hear that microfibers are in our lungs or even our brains, it’s easy to feel powerless. So we try to focus on solutions-based messaging wherever possible. Earlier this year, we ran a national poll on attitudes toward microplastic pollution, and what really stood out was how positively people responded when we paired problems with specific solutions. Across age ranges and regions, support was consistently high — around 80% — for every solution we presented.

That reinforces what we see anecdotally: When people understand both the issue and what they can do about it, they feel more hopeful and more willing to engage. So whenever we share research, we also try to offer a practical action, a better material choice, or a way to support policy. It’s about giving people a pathway forward, not just telling them all the ways the problem is getting worse.

Last year, we created the “Do Less for the Planet” campaign because we knew we’d be sharing a lot of new research on microfiber pollution, and we didn’t want people to feel overwhelmed by bad news. The question we always get is, “What can I do about it?” And the science showed something surprisingly simple: one of the most effective things individuals can do is actually to do less — buy less, wash less, waste less.

Those became our three pillars:

  • Buy Less: Keep clothing in circulation longer through secondhand, swaps, and repairs.
  • Wash Less: Washing and drying are major sources of microfiber emissions, and most of us wash far more often than necessary.
  • Waste Less: Repairing and caring for what we have reduces the need for new clothing and the shedding that comes with it.

We paired the campaign with practical tools — workshops, mending tutorials, and downloadable guides — and people responded really positively. These are low-cost, accessible actions that actually make a difference.

Lisa: From the science side, it was a great way to share research in a way people could immediately apply. For example, most shedding happens in the first few washes, so secondhand clothing emits far fewer fibers. The campaign made those kinds of insights feel tangible and doable. We’re all going to keep wearing clothes. “Do Less” helps people understand what’s realistic and what really matters.

Real Action

Bioneers: For someone who wants to reduce microfiber pollution from home, which actions truly make the biggest difference?

Andra: The simplest actions are often the most powerful, which is where our “Do Less” framing comes from. Buying less, washing less, and wasting less all make a measurable difference — and they’re free.

Lisa: Another meaningful option, if someone has the ability, is installing a washing machine filter. They can capture up to 90% of microfibers from a single load. They’re not accessible for everyone yet — cost and installation can be barriers — but they’re a powerful tool if it’s an option.

In terms of actions that matter less, sometimes people get very focused on things that don’t change much, like switching from one type of synthetic garment to another. Those choices can help, but they’re not as impactful as reducing the amount of washing, line drying, or simply consuming less overall.

Systems Change

Bioneers: How do you think about balancing individual actions with the larger systemic changes needed from industry and policymakers?

Andra: For us, it’s never an either/or; both levels of action matter, and they resonate with different people. Some folks love simple, everyday steps like washing less or shopping secondhand. Others want to plug into policy efforts or support filtration requirements on washing machines. We try to meet people wherever they are by offering both.

And the truth is, individual and systemic actions reinforce each other. When people learn about an issue and start taking small steps, they also become more likely to sign a petition, call an elected official, or support a brand that’s trying to change its practices. Policymakers and businesses pay attention to that — they listen to their stakeholders. Consumer awareness and pressure can absolutely help drive bigger, upstream changes.

Lisa: Exactly. The consumer and industry solutions actually dovetail. For instance, washing machine filters work incredibly well, but they’re expensive. That’s why the next logical step is requiring manufacturers to build filtration into machines by default.

The evidence from household trials helps lay the groundwork for policy and industry action. It shows that people will use these tools correctly and that the technology meaningfully reduces microfiber emissions. And the same pattern holds across the supply chain: Consumer-level insights often help make the case for industry-level solutions.

Bioneers: Where in the textile supply chain are the most promising solutions emerging right now?

Lisa: We’re seeing progress across the whole supply chain, which is encouraging. Downstream solutions like washing machine and dryer filters are advancing quickly. But solutions are also moving farther upstream, into the design and manufacturing stages, which is where emissions can be reduced most significantly.

During textile production, clothing sheds a huge amount of microfibers, especially when fabrics are dyed at high temperatures or washed repeatedly during processing. Many consumers never see this stage because it happens behind the scenes, often overseas, but it’s a major source of pollution. That’s why we just published an Industry Playbook outlining best practices — from choosing materials that shed less, to manufacturing processes that reduce fiber release, to filtration systems in textile mills.

These interventions can dramatically lower emissions long before a garment ever reaches someone’s home.

Andra: On the innovation front, more brands are experimenting with new, nature-based fibers or re-thinking durability so clothing lasts longer and sheds less. Each of these pieces is part of a much bigger shift, and even if they’re not widespread yet, they show what’s possible when companies start investing in R&D.

The Hopeful Horizon

Bioneers: What gives each of you hope right now when you look at the future of textiles, innovation, and microfiber solutions?

Lisa: I’m really encouraged by how quickly the cycle of problem → solution → innovation is tightening. Once we understood the scale of microfiber emissions from washing machines, it didn’t take long for filtration technology to follow and to prove incredibly effective. The same thing is now happening with dryers: The research is only a couple of years old, and we already have emerging solutions that can capture airborne fibers before they escape into the environment.

What excites me most is that these solutions are moving farther upstream. Textile manufacturers are starting to look seriously at durability, shedding rates, and ways to reduce fiber loss during production. That stage of the supply chain has enormous potential, and we’re seeing more companies engage with the science and invest in improvements. The pace of innovation is accelerating, and that gives me a lot of hope.

Andra: I get excited when I see brands experimenting with entirely new kinds of fibers — especially ones derived from nature-based materials. Some companies are exploring seaweed-based fibers, for example. They’re still in early stages, and we’ll need solid research to understand their full impacts, but it’s inspiring to see real investment in rethinking what textiles can be.

These innovations won’t solve everything overnight, and some will hit roadblocks. But the fact that companies are pouring resources into R&D and trying bold new ideas is energizing. It shows that people are taking the problem seriously and looking for long-term, systemic solutions.

What They Knew: PFAS, Corporate Secrecy, and the Citizens Demanding Accountability

They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by investigative journalist Mariah Blake is one of the most important books I’ve read in the past decade. The title is not an allegory so much as a statement of fact:

THEY: Corporations including DuPont and 3M, along with the US Government 

POISONED: Created, used, and marketed substances known to be incredibly toxic and pervasive, while covering up the health implications. 

THE WORLD: These human-made chemicals can be found at various concentrations in every single biological organism, water body and soil sample on earth. 

With echoes of the immense importance of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book is at once a history of an entire class of chemicals, a profile of the roots of corporate power and government influence, and a contemporary story of the unbelievably dedicated citizen activists who have been responsible for the grassroots movement that has led to 30 states passing some variety of PFAS bans, including outright bans on the entire class of chemicals, along with some 15,000 lawsuits underway. 

It is equal parts a riveting history of how industrial chemistry has transformed our world and an inspiring profile of the immense dedication of regular people who discovered the unimaginable, that they, their families, and their entire communities were being poisoned without their knowledge by global corporate chemical companies. This is not a story set entirely in some early pre-regulatory era; while the development of the chemicals themselves originated in the early part of the 20th century, this is absolutely a contemporary story, taking place within the past decade. It remains literally criminal that this level of corporate malfeasance and lack of effective government oversight continues to exist today. 

Sadly, a number of these activists – mothers, sons, daughters, fathers – have already died as a result of the toxic exposure that they sued manufacturers like DuPont and 3M for. Much of what we know about the health effects of this class of chemicals, as is detailed in the book, comes from the discovery that emerged as part of these lawsuits. The companies knew it all along. The takeaway is the combination of the brutal legacy of our modern corporate industrial society and the power and importance of grassroots citizen activism. 

I had the opportunity to speak to the author, Mariah Blake, about the research she conducted for the book, the incredible stories she uncovered and the state of the field of PFAS pollution and prevention. (Read an excerpt tracing the Manhattan Project origins of PFAS.)

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University. 

TEO GROSSMAN, BIONEERS: Thank you so much for speaking with me. This is a phenomenally well-researched project that took nearly a decade to complete. How did you end up deciding to write this book?

MARIAH BLAKE, AUTHOR OF THEY POISONED THE WORLD: It really was a personal journey at first. When I was pregnant with my son back in 2010, I started to be concerned about toxic chemicals that are known to be extremely harmful to developing fetuses and to young children, so I started researching chemicals like BPA. What I discovered was really troubling and I started writing investigative stories, first about BPA, then about BPA replacements, then about the tobacco industry-style tactics that the plastics industry uses to downplay the health effects of certain plastics. In the course of that research, I happened to stumble upon a legal complaint that had been filed by a family of West Virginia farmers, which was my introduction to PFAS. 

These family farmers had sold DuPont some acreage for a landfill, and DuPont ran a local factory that made or made Teflon. After this family sold DuPont the acreage, their cows started getting sick in horrible ways and dying off, and the family was convinced that the landfill was to blame. They brought suit against DuPont, which ended up exposing a cover-up involving the forever chemical PFOA, which is used to make Teflon. The documents from that lawsuit and a subsequent class action lawsuit indicated that DuPont had knowingly contaminated the drinking water with this chemical.

At the time that I stumbled upon that complaint in 2015, almost no one had heard of this class of chemicals outside the scientific community. I was mind-blown, and decided to write a story about these farmers and their legal battle with DuPont. There have since been additional lawsuits and litigation, but a lot of what we know about these chemicals is a result of what happened in this one community – Parkersburg, West Virginia. 

I wrote and published that story in 2015, and that’s really what got me started on this path. 

TEO: Can you explain what the class of chemicals known as PFAS (technically: perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are?

MARIAH: PFAS are a large family of substances. There are about 9,000 of them that have some pretty amazing properties that make them incredibly useful, and as a result, they have found their way into thousands of everyday products. They’re in everything from lipstick and cell phones to diapers, children’s clothing, carpeting, dental floss, kitty litter, feminine hygiene products, cleaning products, outdoor products – you name it. They are also very useful for a variety of industrial applications.  

They are also the most insidious pollutants, I believe, in all of human history. They persist in the environment for thousands of years. I have seen internal industry documents that suggest that some of them persist for much longer. One particular molecule is estimated to have a half-life of a million years, which is way longer than plutonium. We’re talking about a timescale that’s more akin to nuclear waste. 

Those that have been studied are extremely toxic to life, even in the smallest of doses. They are literally polluting the entire planet, including human blood and ecosystems in the remotest parts of the world.

There has been a lot of concern in recent years about microplastics and the fact that microplastics are in the deepest parts of the ocean, that they’re in our brains and human testicles. PFAS are also in all of those places. Virtually every living being carries these chemicals in its body, and the evidence that they are harmful to human health and the environment is much stronger than for microplastics. 

TEO: You mentioned nuclear waste. In some ways, this is a story about the relationship between corporate power and the American government. In the book, you uncover the through line between the birth of nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project, and the large-scale development of PFAS. As I understand it, it’s very unlikely that PFAS could have been produced at the current scale without the enormous investment that resulted from the effort to build the first nuclear weapon. There is a certain sort of tragic irony in the entwined beginnings of two of humanity’s most long-lived and toxic technological achievements.

MARIAH: That is absolutely true. This is one of the things I found most astonishing in the course of my research, because this is not part of the sort of official history of the Manhattan Project or the official history of PFAS. This class of chemicals, which is now ubiquitous in the environment and in our homes, was developed by the U.S. government as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. 

There had been a couple of molecules that were developed by accident and existed in tiny quantities. They had never been produced on scale. One was developed by DuPont prior to the war, and one was developed by a chemist working in a university laboratory. But the entire class would not exist if it weren’t for the Manhattan Project. 

It was a large and elaborate program to develop materials with special properties that could contain a chemical essential to the bomb called uranium hexafluoride, which was so corrosive that it burned through everything, including steel. 

Manhattan Project scientists determined that only substances that involved a combination of fluorine and carbon, which together form the strongest bond in chemistry, could contain this highly corrosive chemical. PFAS fit the bill. 

Just as there were physicists and engineers working in secret laboratories all across the country to develop nuclear fuels and the bomb itself, there were chemists working in laboratories all across the country to develop PFAS. DuPont oversaw a lot of this work and began mass-producing them in 1943.

TEO:  You write about a meeting between someone who was way up in the Manhattan Project and the team at DuPont in charge of producing PFAS, who apparently declined a couple times initially when approached. 

MARIAH: A top Manhattan Project official approached DuPont and actually disclosed what they were working on, which at that point was highly secretive, and DuPont believed the entire project was beyond human capability, that it would involve enormous liability, and they wanted nothing to do with it. 

But the government eventually persuaded DuPont to get involved. Both of these efforts were technological marvels that would probably never have happened if it weren’t for the vast quantity of government resources that were thrown at them during the war.

I often think about what we, as a society, could do if we directed those kinds of government resources towards other types of problems that society faces, bringing in all the leading scientific minds in the country together. 

TEO: You mentioned DuPont’s initial reluctance to get involved had to do with whether they could pull it off and how expensive it would be. Were they also concerned about liability?

MARIAH: Given the toxicity of the feedstocks of the chemicals used to make PFAS, I think almost as soon as they went into mass production, it became clear that this was dangerous chemistry. 

One of the interesting aspects of liability is that the U.S. government agreed to indemnify DuPont, meaning the U.S. government would be liable, not DuPont. The U.S. government conducted research very early on that found that PFAS were highly toxic and that they were accumulating in human blood. By the 1970s, U.S. government scientists, as part of a secret medical research program that began under the Manhattan Project, had determined that these chemicals were accumulating in human blood all over the United States. But the U.S. government chose to suppress that information because of the potential liability to itself. So the liability wasn’t just a concern for the corporations; it was a concern for the government. 

The FDA started looking at contamination around this plant in New Jersey, where DuPont produced PFAS in the 1940s. Leslie Groves, the very top official in the Manhattan Project, maneuvered to shut that inquiry down. 

The manufacturers of these chemicals – DuPont and 3M were the main manufacturers – have known since the 1960s that they were highly toxic. They’ve known since the 1970s that they don’t break down in the environment. They have known for many years that they have devastating effects on lab animals, that they are linked to all kinds of diseases, and workers—that they are in the blood of people all over the world. 

It wasn’t so much liability concerns as the primacy of profit that drove these companies to withhold that information. I think there was also, early on, this mentality among the scientists and companies involved in developing these synthetic materials that the potential benefits to society were so enormous that they outweighed any potential drawbacks. 

They made that decision, but the rest of us, who are all exposed to these substances, didn’t have the opportunity to comment. They were foisted on us without our consent. 

TEO: You outline a fact in the book which is something that I don’t think most people are aware of: that the vast majority of the chemicals in use in this country have not been tested for toxicity.

MARIAH: There are 80,000 chemicals in circulation in the United States, and there are hundreds, maybe, that have undergone systematic, EPA-supervised review. The principle that underlies our system for regulating toxic substances is that they should be presumed safe until proven otherwise. This is a principle that was first articulated by DuPont scientists in the 1920s, during the development of leaded gasoline, the question of whether or not to bring leaded gasoline onto the market without researching the health and environmental implications of releasing huge quantities of lead into the air. 

The Toxic Substances Control Act is the main law governing chemical safety in this country. All of the chemicals that were in existence at the time it was passed were grandfathered in, and even new chemicals aren’t required to be tested for safety in the vast majority of circumstances. People presume that the chemicals that they’re coming into contact with every day wouldn’t be on the market if they hadn’t been vetted for safety, but in fact, very, very few of them have.

TEO: Your book takes two connected paths. One is the historical narrative about the development of forever chemicals that we’ve discussed just recently. That is juxtaposed with a contemporary personal narrative focusing on individuals from two communities that turned out to be hotbeds for PFAS pollution as well as the beginning of what continues to be a very inspiring example of citizen activism in the face of corporate malfeasance. 

MARIAH:  I didn’t really set out to write a book about citizen activists. I actually thought this was going to be an investigative history of the chemical industry told through this one class of chemicals, and the human story was going to be what happened in Parkersburg, West Virginia, which I described earlier. I went and spent some time there when I wrote that story. This family of West Virginia farmers had been completely devastated by PFAS contamination on their farm. They had lost over 150 head of cattle. They had many serious health problems. In fact, almost all of the family members are dead at this point. 

When they began to speak out against DuPont, they got incredible flak from the community. But they persisted, and ended up scoring this pretty remarkable victory against the company, which set the groundwork for everything that followed. 

In 2016, stories about Hoosick Falls, a community in upstate New York, began cropping up in the national headlines. Hoosick Falls had discovered PFOA, the Teflon chemical, in its drinking water. A local insurance underwriter named Michael lost his father to a miserable death from kidney cancer. His father had worked at the local factory that made Teflon-coated fabric and Michael suspected that the community’s drinking water was polluted because the factory was right next to the village’s well field. When he tested his own tap water, he found levels that were 100 times the EPA safety standard.

I traveled to Hoosick Falls to meet Michael. He was the least likely activist you can imagine, an unassuming insurance underwriter who had no interest in politics or environmental issues. He had a fear of public speaking. He liked to joke that he got his political news from ESPN. Yet he was spearheading this fight against several giant multinational corporations and government agencies to get his community clean drinking water. 

Other people in the community, who were equally unlikely activists, joined this fight, and I was moved by their stories. Many suffered devastating personal losses, and they were driven by their anguish and grief. They were becoming very effective advocates, and things were starting to change as a result of what they were doing. 

I ended up spending basically eight years embedded in the lives of four families in Hoosick Falls and it was through their eyes that I witnessed the rise of this broader movement.

TEO: In the end, their advocacy really did influence the course of political and regulatory events. 

MARIAH: As I was witnessing the events unfolding in Hoosick Falls, variations of what was happening there started playing out all over the country. Partially as a result of what was happening in Hoosick Falls, tens of millions of Americans learned their drinking water was contaminated. Farmers all over the country began learning that their farms had been polluted with sewage sludge that had been spread over the land as fertilizer. All of this generated a wealth of media coverage and scientific interest, leading to studies showing that these chemicals were ubiquitous in consumer goods.

As this happened, unlikely activist groups sprang up all over the country. And people began to get involved who wouldn’t normally consider themselves activists – farmers, factory workers, suburban moms, Republicans and Democrats. By 2019, we began to see pretty dramatic shifts in policy starting to happen as a result of their advocacy. Bipartisan legislation to restrict PFAS began passing through Congress during the first Trump administration. The EPA began working on drinking water standards for six PFAS, which were finalized under the Biden administration. Some of this progress has been repealed by the current Trump administration, but most of it is actually still in place. 

More important than what’s happened on the federal level is what’s happened on the state level. Largely as a result of this citizen activism, there has been a groundswell of legislation on the state level that is really unprecedented. So far, 30 U.S. states have passed more than 200 bills restricting PFAS, and that includes at least 16 full or total bans on the entire class of chemicals in consumer goods. This is groundbreaking because that’s not how we regulate chemicals in this country. We normally regulate them one by one. 

Perhaps the most interesting and hope-inspiring part of the story is that progress has continued under the Trump administration. There are 250 PFAS-specific bills pending in state houses right now, many in red states – Texas, Oklahoma, Montana. 

There is also an enormous volume of litigation, with at least 15,000 lawsuits pending against manufacturers. These two forces, combined with the groundswell of legislation and the groundswell of litigation, combined with the reality that the EU is weighing a class-wide ban on these chemicals, are prompting large swathes of the economy to voluntarily move away from PFAS. 

3M, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of these chemicals, has announced that it will quit producing them by the end of 2025. At least 40 major retail chains with nearly $2 trillion in sales have committed to eliminating or radically reducing these chemicals in their supply lines.

What I argue in the book, and what I still believe, is that this is moving us closer to the kind of economic tipping point that could actually lead us to turn off the tap on these chemicals. 

All of this is driven by ordinary citizens and citizen activism. Everything we know about these chemicals we wouldn’t know without the Tennant family and those in Hoosick Falls. The book outlines the powerful and entrenched obstacles that all these families are up against. It is an enormous victory and a testament to their will that they’ve made the progress that they have.

TEO: It’s literally the definition of criminal that citizen activism is required to expose the systematic poisoning of an entire population. Where do we go from here?

MARIAH: Turning off the tap is everybody’s goal. But there is no step two. That’s the problem. There really is no way to clean up these chemicals once they are in the environment. They can be filtered out of drinking water, but then you just have a concentrated stew of PFAS. What do you do with that? Well, you can put it into a landfill, but all landfills eventually leak, when you’re talking about a material that persists in the environment for thousands of years or more. You can incinerate them, but unless you incinerate them at a high enough heat, they just break down into smaller PFAS and disperse through the environment. There are three incinerators in this entire country that burn hot enough to actually destroy PFAS. There are technologies under development that could potentially break them down, but not on a meaningful scale, given the vast quantities of these chemicals already in the environment. 

The solution is to turn off the tap. Scientists who study these chemicals will tell you the same thing. That’s the goal of every activist out there. The solution has to be upstream. 

TEO: That leads us to the next question, and then we can conclude. I read your book, and immediately upon finishing it, I looked up my town’s water report. Lo and behold, my town water report did actually report on PFAS, which I believe is a new EPA requirement. I checked whether the water filter that I have in my house already filters for these contaminants. Given the ubiquity of these chemicals and their terrifying health impacts, what can we all do to protect ourselves and our families?

MARIAH: That’s a very good starting point. I would recommend that everybody filter their water, because the EPA is only testing for, I believe, 26 of the 9,000 PFAS that are out there. Scientists are now discovering that there are certain PFAS molecules that are more abundant in the environment than all of the ones they’re testing for combined, and we don’t have the technology to test for that. Even if your water quality report says they’re not in your water, they may be in your water. Buy a filtration system that is certified to remove PFAS, an under-sink system. Those are affordable and easy to install.

The best thing for people to do is to consult the resources that are available online. I have some resources available on my website. The Environmental Working Group, which has really been at the forefront of this issue from the very beginning, has some excellent resources on its website. Clean Water Action and Toxic Free Future are two organizations fighting for state and federal regulation of PFAS. There are a lot of opportunities for people to get involved with Toxic Free Future.

For people who live in communities with contaminated drinking water, the National PFAS Contamination Coalition is a coalition of grassroots groups from all over the country. Often, there may be just one individual living in a community, but once they are able to share resources and strategies, they can be a force to be reckoned with.

TEO: Mariah, thank you so much for your dedication and your writing. It could not be more important. 

Read an excerpt from Mariah Blake’s They Poisoned the World here.

How PFAS Began: Inside the Manhattan Project’s Chemical Legacy

The story of “forever chemicals” often begins in the headlines of the last decade — contaminated water systems, cancer clusters, corporate cover-ups, and a growing sense that something invisible has seeped into every corner of modern life. But the crisis didn’t appear overnight. Its roots stretch back nearly a century, to a moment when chemists racing to build the world’s first atomic bomb stumbled onto materials unlike anything the world had seen before.

In They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, investigative journalist Mariah Blake traces the full arc of this unfolding catastrophe. (Read our in-depth conversation with Mariah Blake.) Part exposé, part human drama, the book uncovers how PFAS — a vast family of indestructible industrial compounds now found in the blood of nearly every person on Earth — were born in secrecy, promoted as miracles of modern chemistry, and shielded from scrutiny even as early evidence pointed to devastating health impacts. Blake weaves together two timelines: the behind-the-scenes machinations of chemical manufacturers and federal regulators, and the grassroots uprising that emerged decades later when residents of Hoosick Falls, New York, discovered their drinking water was contaminated and refused to stay silent.

The excerpt below comes from early in the book, where Blake traces PFAS’s origin story to the high-stakes laboratories of the Manhattan Project. It’s a glimpse into the frantic wartime research, the industrial acceleration, and the overlooked hazards that laid the foundation for one of the most sweeping public health crises of our time.

This history reminds us that the materials we create — and the systems we entrust to oversee them — shape the world for generations. And understanding how PFAS began is essential to understanding the fight to hold polluters accountable today.

On a clear, hot afternoon in July 1939, a car carrying the esteemed physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner rumbled up the drive of a humble white cottage on Long Island’s Cutchogue Harbor, the verdant retreat where Albert Einstein was passing his summer. In recent years, scientists around the world had begun experimenting with splitting uranium atoms, a process with the potential to release virtually unlimited energy. Some believed it could also lead to ferocious new weapons. Wigner and Szilard, both Hungarian-born Jews who had studied under Einstein in Berlin before the rise of Adolf Hitler, were convinced that the Nazis were already on the brink of making an atomic bomb. But their desperate efforts to warn U.S. officials had led nowhere, so they decided to approach the one person in their orbit who they believed could get their message through.

Dressed in an undershirt and rolled-up pants, Einstein greeted his old friends and led them to a screened-in porch overlooking a sloping lawn. There, between sips of iced tea, Szilard and Wigner explained the scientific reasons for their fears. In the past, Einstein had voiced skepticism about the chances of harvesting large-scale nuclear energy in the near term. But Wigner and Szilard persuaded him it was possible. Although he was an ardent pacifist, Einstein agreed to help alert the U.S. government to the threat, and on August 2, 1939, a spare two-page letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt went out under the renowned physicist’s name. It urged the president to speed up experimental work on uranium by underwriting university research and “obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.”

Heeding this warning, the Roosevelt administration began secretly funding research by a team of physicists at Columbia University. The goal was to isolate a rare class of uranium atoms that were capable of producing nuclear chain reactions—the only process that could yield enough energy for an atom bomb. Separating the minuscule particles from the rest of the uranium ore presented mind-bending technical challenges. But the physicists devised several possible methods. The most promising—gaseous diffusion—involved converting uranium into a gas called uranium hexafluoride, or hex, and pumping it through a maze of porous barriers. Since the desired isotope, uranium-235, passed through the tiny pores more easily, the rest of the atoms would gradually be filtered out, leaving only the prized nuclear fuel.

However, because hex also contained fluorine, the infamous Lucifer’s gas, the compound was dangerous to work with and fiercely corrosive, making it extremely difficult to contain. If the project stood any chance of succeeding, the physicists needed materials that could stand up to both fluorine and hex in some of the harshest conditions imaginable.

The Nobel Prize–winning scientist overseeing the uranium program, Harold Urey, suspected that only other compounds containing fluorine would work—specifically those containing fluorine and carbon, which together form the strongest bond in chemistry. Such materials were extremely rare, but Urey managed to track down a few drops of a fluorocarbon liquid, the result of a laboratory accident at Pennsylvania State University. Sure enough, when mixed with the hex, it produced no reaction.

This was a major breakthrough. But making enough uranium for a bomb would require mind-boggling quantities of hex-resistant equipment. Urey’s team would need an assortment of fluorocarbons suited to various purposes. Among the most urgent was a fluorocarbon plastic that could be fashioned into seals and gaskets to keep the enrichment system airtight. As luck would have it, DuPont had already developed one that seemed to fit the bill: Teflon. The company hadn’t figured out how to make more than a few ounces at a time, but it had a history of ramping up production fast.

Urey’s deputy eventually summoned Malcolm Renfrew, the chemist overseeing DuPont’s stalled Teflon program, to Columbia, by then the bustling hub of the bomb project. Without revealing the exact nature of the enterprise, he pleaded for Renfrew’s help. “He told us there was a development now coming on in this country and in Germany which would determine who would win the war, that it was going to be extraordinarily important for us to be participating at our maximum strength,” the chemist recalled. Renfrew would be given a few weeks to prepare, and then DuPont was expected to break ground on a plant that manufactured a million-plus pounds of Teflon per year.

The conversation left Renfrew “popeyed,” as he later recalled. Nevertheless, DuPont agreed to launch a government-funded crash program to figure out how to produce Teflon at scale. A team of chemists and engineers at Renfrew’s lab in Kearny, New Jersey, worked around the clock building a pilot plant. Almost as soon as construction was finished, the plant exploded, killing two young workers. The crew rebuilt it—this time with blast walls and remote controls to handle the most dangerous work. Meanwhile, another DuPont team studying molding techniques discovered that a combination of pressure and extreme heat melded Teflon powder into sheets that could be sliced and sculpted into hex-proof gaskets.

By late 1941, the government was recruiting chemists from venerable institutions like Purdue and Cornell to cultivate other types of fluorocarbons—among them refrigerants, sealants, and lubricants—and overcome the daunting technical barriers to large-scale production. A team from Johns Hopkins worked with DuPont to develop industrial methods for isolating fluorine and manufacturing other previously scarce substances essential for fluorocarbon production. The university scientists weren’t told why their expertise was needed, and the coordination among them was initially haphazard.

That all changed in July 1942. Urey convened a secret meeting with military officials, DuPont executives, and chemists from various universities at Dumbarton Oaks, an august estate in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. There, he announced plans to “sponsor closer collaboration” among attendees. The primary goal was to develop a specific class of fluorocarbons whose defining feature was multiple fluorine-carbon bonds, making them virtually indestructible—a group of substances that would later become known as forever chemicals or PFAS. In the interest of speed, participants were told, the government was willing to fund all lines of inquiry simultaneously and pay generously for the resulting materials. (“Dollar cost will be a very small factor,” the meeting minutes noted.)

The event touched off a technological race among project chemists that mirrored the urgent, all-at-once approach to developing nuclear fuels. Because of DuPont’s unrivaled experience with fluorine compounds, it was charged with coordinating their efforts. Chemists at various universities compiled their data into monthly reports for DuPont’s research director, who kept Urey updated and helped rush discoveries into production. In the last two months of 1942 alone, the government contracted with DuPont to build two factories to produce fluorocarbon lubricants and sealants based on research from university scientists, and a third facility to manufacture a chemical critical to the production of both fluorocarbons and hex—which were now a matter of national security.

…

In keeping with the Lewis Committee’s recommendation, this method was now the top priority. While most of the fuel programs were relegated to the pilot-plant phase, work immediately began on a full-scale gaseous diffusion plant. The scope of the operation was breathtaking. Composed of fifty-one interconnected buildings spread over forty-plus acres in rural Tennessee, it housed an elaborate mechanical labyrinth involving hundreds of miles of pipe and tens of thousands of filters, seals, gaskets, and pumps—virtually all of which needed to be hex resistant. To overcome the lingering technical barriers, Urey’s team recruited more chemists. Even with the added government resources, DuPont couldn’t manage to produce Teflon in the quantities needed. [Because Teflon warped under pressure, the modest quantities DuPont did produce weren’t suited to uranium enrichment. But the material found other wartime uses, including as linings for liquid fuel tanks and nose cones for “proximity bombs.”]  But it brought other fluorocarbons from research bench to mass production at a previously unimaginable speed. By late 1943, DuPont had more than a thousand workers and several factories pumping out tens of thousands of pounds of these substances at its Chambers Works site in Deepwater, New Jersey.

Fluorocarbons were hardly the only substances undergoing rapid development during this period. Faced with shortages of natural materials like steel and rubber, in 1941 the board overseeing U.S. military provisions had called for substituting plastics whenever possible. The government had since spent huge sums developing synthetic materials and expanding the assembly lines of DuPont and other companies so they could produce the quantities needed for global warfare. As a result, onetime laboratory curiosities like synthetic rubber and polyethylene were suddenly being produced in massive quantities and fashioned into everything from bazooka barrels and parachutes to fighter-plane windshields. Charles Stine marveled at the fruits of this unprecedented collaboration between industry and government in a speech before the American Chemical Society: “The pressures of this war are compressing into the space of months developments that might have taken us a half-century to realize.”

But while most of the new synthetics grew out of established branches of chemistry, fluorocarbons were a virgin frontier mined with poorly understood hazards, and the frenzied pace left little time for developing safeguards. At DuPont’s Chambers Works, the dangers of the fluorocarbon processing areas were legendary. Fires and explosions were commonplace; employees were regularly hospitalized with breathing problems, chemical burns, or worse. Manhattan Project inspectors warned their supervisors that widespread fear of injury was leading to unrest among workers and that DuPont employees had come to dread an assignment there as “an exile to Devil’s Island.”

Excerpted from THEY POISONED THE WORLD by Mariah Blake. Copyright © 2025 by Mariah Blake. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Read our in-depth conversation with They Poisoned the World author Mariah Blake here.

The Great Enshittening: How the Internet Got So Bad — and How We Can Fix It

The internet wasn’t always like this. Once a space for discovery, connection, and creativity, it’s become increasingly extractive and disheartening — a pattern Cory Doctorow has coined enshittification. In his new book, Enshittification: How the Internet Got So Bad — and How We Can Fix It, Doctorow diagnoses what went wrong and charts a path toward repair.

As platforms consolidate power and prioritize profit over people, Doctorow argues that the same forces hollowing out the digital world are shaping our physical one — from the tools we use to the systems we depend on. But his message isn’t just about decline — it’s about the possibility of reversing it.

A longtime friend of Bioneers, Doctorow’s ideas challenge us to imagine a future where technology serves humanity, not the other way around. Below, we’re sharing an excerpt from Enshittification. Scroll to the bottom of this article to view a recording of his Bioneers keynote and an interview exploring what it means to build an internet—and a world—fit for human thriving.

The following excerpt is posted with permission from Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow (MCD, 2025).

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.

This is infuriating. It’s frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, it’s terrifying.

I’ve been an internet activist for a quarter of a century, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital human rights group that more or less invented the whole idea of digital human rights. I’ve been a United Nations observer and helped draft internet treaties; I’ve lobbied legislatures and agencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom. I’ve been through street protests and virtual blackouts.

I’ve never seen anything like this.

In 2022, after decades of striving to get people fired up about the esoteric world of internet policy, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity.

It’s a funny, naughty word, and it’s funny and naughty to say, and I’m proud of that. But that’s not why the American Dialect Society named it its word of the year in 2023, nor why Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary named it its word of the year for 2024, nor why millions of people have used it to describe the inescapable online dumpster fire that’s roasting them alive.

The reason for enshittification’s popularity is that it embodies a theory that explains the accelerating decay of the things that matter to us, explaining why this is happening and what we should do about it.

Because enshittification isn’t just a way to say “Something got worse.”* It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.

You see, this moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening? It’s not a mystery. It’s not the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment, decreeing that we must all suffer through the end of services that once met our needs. It’s a material phenomenon, much like a disease.

Like a disease, it has symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. The first part of this book will explain these components of enshittification.

But the point of this analysis isn’t to merely give you a more technically informed way to feel demoralized and furious about the state of the digital world— I wrote this book to propose a cure. That’s the second part of the book.

This era, the Enshittocene, is the result of specific policy decisions, made by named individuals. Once we identify those decisions and those individuals, we can act. We can reverse the decisions. We can name the individuals. We can even estimate what size pitchfork they wear. Or at the very least, we can make sure that they are never again trusted with the power to make policy decisions for the rest of us.

We can make a new, good internet, one that’s fit for human thriving. We can create the digital nervous system we need to connect and coordinate us through a twenty-first century haunted by climate collapse, genocide, authoritarianism, and economic chaos.

We can create enshittification-resistant infrastructure for a new, good world.

* Though it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way! One of the glories of English is its malleability. English words mean whatever English speakers say they mean. Go nuts. You have my blessing.

More from Cory Doctorow


Reclaiming the Digital Commons

Doctorow’s message to Bioneers audiences in 2017 remains urgent today: the internet is the nervous system of the 21st century, and if we want a thriving planet and just societies, it must be free, fair, and open to all. Watch his keynote, The Fight for a Free, Fair and Open Internet, to hear his call to action in full.


How Big Tech Took Over — and How We Take It Back

Continue exploring Cory Doctorow’s vision for a more democratic, accountable tech future in This Will All Be So Great If We Don’t Screw It Up.

In this 2019 interview, Doctorow dives deep into how monopoly power and deregulation paved the way for Big Tech’s dominance — and why restoring fairness and pluralism in technology begins with reclaiming public control.

Read the full interview →

Bioneers Newsletter 11.6.25 — A River, a Whale, and a Revolution in Justice

Ten years ago, one of the most compelling movements in support of Indigenous sovereignty took shape at Standing Rock. The ripples of the protests and prayers and encampments from that time are still with us today. “Mní Wičóni” (Water Is Life) remains a resounding and essential call, articulating a rallying cry in support of the rights of what truly is a water planet. Today, across the world, Indigenous Nations are continuing to transform how we understand justice — extending it beyond human laws to the living systems that sustain us. From freshwater to marine systems, from the Klamath River to the waters of the South Pacific, the Rights of Nature movement is reshaping how societies recognize the inherent rights of fish, whales, rivers, and entire oceans to exist and thrive.

This issue of The Pulse brings together powerful stories of leadership, resilience, and restoration, from Indigenous Nations advancing groundbreaking laws to families healing the waters that have long sustained them.

Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.

Shifting the Tides of Justice: Advancing the Rights of Fish and Aquatic Mammals

In this powerful conversation, Raynell Morris (Lummi Nation) and Juliette Jackson, JD (Klamath) share how their Nations are advancing Rights of Nature protections rooted in Indigenous law and values. From recognizing the inherent rights of salmon and orcas to ensuring ecosystems can thrive for generations to come, their work reflects a centuries-long commitment to defending the natural world as kin, not property.

Moderated by Britt Gondolfi of Bioneers, this session highlights the growing movement among Tribal Nations to integrate Indigenous worldviews into modern legal frameworks — and to restore balance between people, animals, and the waters that sustain all life.

Watch now.

When the Salmon Died: A Family’s Fight to Restore the Klamath River

For generations, the Yurok people have fought to restore the Klamath River — a lifeline for salmon, culture, and ceremony. In this powerful excerpt from her new book, The Water Remembers, Amy Bowers Cordalis (Yurok) recounts the devastating 2002 fish kill that became a turning point for her family and her Nation’s long struggle for justice.

The Klamath now flows freely again and holds legal personhood under Yurok law, allowing the river itself to be represented in court. It’s a profound shift that mirrors what Amy’s story captures so vividly: a river’s suffering intertwined with a people’s resilience, and the restoration of both.

Read now.

Tonga’s Bold Move to Grant Whales Legal Rights (Atmos)

In the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, whales are not just wildlife — they are ancestors, deities, and kin. Now, whale and ocean advocates are working to ensure that sacred relationship is reflected in law. Ahead of Tonga’s upcoming elections, a proposed bill called Te Mana o te Tohorā (Authority of the Whale) would grant whales legal personhood, recognizing their inherent rights to exist, thrive, and be healthy.

Led by Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho and supported by Indigenous ocean advocates across the Pacific, this effort could make Tonga the first nation in the world to legally recognize the rights of whales, reshaping global ocean conservation through ancestral knowledge and modern law.

Read now.

Featured Reading: Stop Killing the Klamath

In “Stop Killing the Klamath: Rights of Nature Protections within Tribal Jurisdictions,” Juliette Jackson (Klamath Tribes) proposes a bold new pathway for Tribal Nations to defend the sacred. By pairing the National Historic Preservation Act’s Traditional Cultural Property designation with emerging Rights of Nature frameworks, Jackson illustrates how Indigenous law and federal statutes can work together to protect life-sustaining ecosystems. Her work is both a legal innovation and a love letter to the Klamath homelands — showing how ancestral law and modern advocacy can unite to restore balance.

Read now.

Get Ready: Bioneers 2026 Registration Opens Soon

The countdown is on! Registration for the 2026 Bioneers Conference opens in early December, and you’ll want to be among the first to grab your spot. Stay tuned to your inbox for announcements, or sign up for conference alerts to get early access to tickets.