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.

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

A transformative movement is emerging at the intersection of Tribal Sovereignty and the Rights of Nature, as Indigenous Nations lead efforts to recognize the inherent rights of fish, aquatic mammals, and the ecosystems they inhabit. This panel explores how Tribal Nations are adopting Rights of Nature policies in a centuries-long effort to protect marine life and the ecosystems essential to all beings.

This panel highlights the visionary leadership of Indigenous leaders who have spearheaded innovative laws and grassroots movements to integrate Indigenous values into Western legal systems. Their work serves as a global call to action, urging a reimagining of legal frameworks that honor Indigenous wisdom and foster a world where the rights of nature and human rights are interconnected and respected. Moderated by Britt Gondolfi, J.D. With: Raynell Morris (Lummi Nation), Erica Perez and Juliette Jackson, J.D. (Klamath).

Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir

Trevor Warmedahl, traveled around the world apprenticing with traditional, pastoral cheese makers. His discovery of terroir–a flavor that expresses the landscape, the animals and the process–came as an almost spiritual revelation while working in the Alta Langhe hills in Italy where they make a regional cheese called Tuma. The following is an excerpt from new book Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir, (Chelsea Green Publishing February 2026) and is printed with permission from the publisher.

Satori

That the smell of this unassuming little cheese with its microbial wilderness could induce this state of rapture in me as it released its spores and aromatic compounds into the air was revelatory. It was my first cheese satori, to adopt the Zen Buddhist term referring to a sudden enlightenment, a feeling of total presence, an extreme, consciousness–expanding epiphany. That a cheese could have such a characteristic personality made real what had been just a concept before, introduced to me in that Seattle bar ten years earlier. The notion of terroir crept out of my brain like a spreading fungal mycelium and moved through my whole body. Some cheeses are consciousness altering, more entheogen than food. These few moments of heaven are locked permanently in my flavor memory bank, setting a precedent from which I would spend the next three years recovering. Chasing that first high, I would venture into the forgotten folds of the planet where other boundary–dissolving, cheese–born intoxicants lurked, guarded by faithful initiates, persecuted by the servants of an empire that fears everything unabashedly sexual and of the earth.

I had never experienced such an undeniable sensory experience of what I would later dub deep terroir, where a direct aromatic correlation exists between a cheese and the place it is made. That place wasn’t just a creamery, mind you. It was a field of plants about to enter winter dormancy, growing from wet, fecund September earth on a west–facing hillside above a tributary of the Po River in the Alta Langhe hills on the piece of Planet Earth that is temporarily called Italy. The creamery, with its pleasant aroma of souring sheep milk and the yeasty rind of the tuma, could be viewed as a carrier of the terroir seeded by the land and animals. An amplifier, the space in which the seeds of this cheese germinate. That field and this cheese smelled of sheep, with hints of their manure as a seasoning in this aromatic stew. Not in a bad way, but in a pleasant, complementary way. It wasn’t the aroma of many sheep in a closed barn, packing urine and manure into an ammoniated cake without enough interwoven dry plant matter. The aroma of that field included as one element the input of a small flock of healthy sheep with plenty of space, being moved daily. It was a light sprinkle of ovine biology that didn’t overwhelm the other flavors in the stew—the wet grass, dark soil, and rotting leaves. The sheep lay in that field, breathing its air, eating its plants, and walking its contours. The milk carried a certain essence that I couldn’t identify when drinking it. It was likely very subtle, below the threshold of perception for most of us. This essence was then somehow magnified to a perceivable level and altered by the fermentations involved in the cheese make and the subsequent short ripening. Milk can have hints of terroir, but it is really the process of turning it into cheese that can unlock this potential and allow a coherent voice to start speaking.

This cheese is one of the greatest I have tasted, based on that initial powerful sensory imprint left by smelling and then eating it in the place it was produced. Terroir in cheese went from something conceptual to a highly tangible, blissful experience. There was no packaged starter added—the cheese slowly fermented as the bacteria native to the milk sprouted in the infant cheese, into a heavenly cloud of moldy milk that brought me to the verge of a mystical realization. There are cheeses you eat, and there are cheeses that let you shake hands and sit down for a drink with God.

A Global Journey to Learn From Traditional Cheese Makers

For Trevor Warmedahl, food and flavor are passions and ways to experience other cultures. Working in restaurants in Seattle led to his first cheese-making job and stoked an interest in learning more about the full cycle of cheesemaking. He then worked on small farmstead dairies in California and Colorado, and ultimately had an offer to work in a cheese factory in Mongolia. Though his mission there was to teach a European style of making cheese, his eyes were opened to a traditional pastoral foodway that roused his curiosity and launched a global journey to learn cheesemaking from the waning cultures of pastoral people in Asia and Europe. His forthcoming book, Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir, documents his extraordinary culinary journey.    

ARTY: In your global travels, sometimes you planned your trip and other times you say you took a leap of faith that someone would appear and help. There’s a quote in the book: “Sometimes losing the trail is the trail.” You must have been very resourceful to convince people in a variety of countries with different cultures and language barriers to accept you as an apprentice. What was your experience around all of that?

TREVOR: When I first started traveling, I did a trial run trip when I was in Mongolia and I went out and spent time in the countryside staying with families. That’s where this concept of “cheese-trekking” came from. It was quite easy in Mongolia because of the incredible sense of hospitality there. It was nothing out of the ordinary for people to welcome me into their homes and let me observe what they were doing.

And I found that to be the case with pastoral people around the world. There’s an underlying hospitality. It seems to be a trend. I’ve relied on that quite a bit.

Quite often I’m visiting places that are fairly remote and hard to get to, and there are not a lot of travelers visiting these regions, so there’s also not as much of the infrastructure in place for tourism. So, for me to just show up is a novelty and doors open for me. Walking up to some of these villages or shepherds’ camps, the first reaction was, “What do you want?” When they realized I wanted to hang out, people started feeding me. It hasn’t really been a problem.

I’ve mostly had good luck everywhere I’ve gone. At times, things were strange. I ran into a lot of heavy alcoholism and sometimes very rigid social norms around gender roles. There’s a dark side out there, but in general I’ve had really good experiences. And the more I’ve done this, the more I’ve built a résumé for it and more people start inviting me. It’s become easier to find cheese-makers to work with.

Photo courtesy of Trevor Warmedahl

ARTY: There is another quote in the book that, to me, epitomizes your motivation for your trekking: “To see what remained of older, more practical approaches to making cheese that are not reliant on purchased inputs, to learn the techniques and recipes before they were buried in modernity’s rush, to slaughter everything slow and holy.”

TREVOR: That does sum up the drive that I had. First, It was the sense that something very meaningful was being lost, and that it’s really easy to get bogged down in the tragedy of that and to lament what’s being lost. I decided that the only way to adequately respond to what I was seeing was to go out and experience it while it was still there, and to see if there was anything I could do.

A lot of what’s being lost is being forced out. There’s a paradigm to making food that has been applied from the top down. We see it clearly in agriculture with patented crops and the reliance on fertilizers, the whole systems of industrial agriculture that’s been forced on country after country. The same thing has happened with dairy foods and with cheese. It’s epitomized by the starter cultures and the rennet that are being used. These products are made by a few transnational corporations, and they’re seen as what is modern and what is efficient and reliable.

My work pushes back against that and shows that people have been able to produce these things on their own or locally for a very long time with a very successful track record that I think can actually be safer and more reliable than these purchased inputs. I’m trying to tell the stories of the places where these old ways haven’t been eradicated, those places where people are resisting or who have been removed from wider economies for so long. But, there is a transition that’s happening and those old ways are fading.  

But over the course of  visiting these places with the imperative to see the traditional ways before they disappeared, my philosophy has become a lot more optimistic. I see that even though the old ways and the traditions are being eroded, new things are popping up that are very interesting, and the old ways live on in kind of unsuspecting ways and have a strange way of popping back up again.

ARTY: Mongolia was your first stop. You didn’t go there with the idea of  starting your journey of cheese-trekking. What did you learn and what did you unlearn in Mongolia?

Photo courtesy of Trevor Warmedahl

TREVOR: I went to Mongolia to manage a cheese plant, more or less, in the same style of cheese-making that I was attempting to get away from, using commercial starter cultures, pasteurizing the milk, and making European style cheeses. But it struck me as being absurd to do that in a country that has vast traditions of making dairy foods.

I went there to do this job, but quickly became jaded and left. And that turned out to be the right thing to do. But Mongolia was where my vision of learning cheesemaking from pastoral people was born.

In Mongolia, I observed people raising huge herds of animals without fences or barns, which I did not understand. It didn’t make sense to me. Oftentimes in the U.S., when livestock get out of the fence, people freak out. If there are animals in the road, the animals freak out. It’s like a weird jailbreak. But in Mongolia, it was the opposite, people would fence in their house to keep the animals out rather than fencing them in. I learned that these people had a profound understanding of the behavior of the animals and that they were working with them; they were integrating themselves into the social structure of a flock or herd and allowing the animals to do what they do. They worked with the psychology of the animals in a completely different way that wasn’t about control. There wasn’t as much manipulation of the behavior of the animals even in their breeding and their genetics. Everything was more hands off.

I saw the same thing in how the cheeses were being made. There wasn’t a need to control what microbes are going in and doing the fermentation. There was a knowledge of how milk ferments. It was a very deep science, a folk science.

There is a romantic image that pastoral communities are just simple shepherds. But, what I encountered were highly intelligent people who were very good at a number of different skills from caring for animals, such as veterinary service, to butchering. They are also very skilled at hunting and fishing and even things like repairing automobiles, and making clothes and tents. They have a vast skillset. That really appealed to me as a different way of approaching knowledge  that, unfortunately, so much of which was being lost in the erosion of this lifestyle.

ARTY: One example of a practice that you came across in Mongolia and Italy, and maybe other places, that is quite different from a Western industrial process and which probably would horrify most Western people as highly unsanitary is the animal teats were never sterilized before milking.

TREVOR: Now it appears strange to me how standard the practice is in the U.S. Sterilizing the teats is done by large industrial producers that probably should be doing it, but even by people who have just a couple of goats. They’re told that they need to put iodine on the teats of the animals, either before and after milking or just after milking. The idea is that when you milk an animal, the orifice that the milk comes out of stays open for a while after milking, and the idea is that bacteria can get inside of it and potentially be problematic for the milk. The science on this is very much debated. I don’t think you really can sanitize something like a biological orifice of a cow. I don’t think it really works that way and I don’t know that you would want to.

Milking a goat in India (photo courtesy of Trevor Warmedahl)

I noticed that in so many other places, they weren’t doing this. At first I was concerned: “Won’t that result in bacteria being in the milk?” And people were like, “yes, of course, there’s supposed to be bacteria in milk.” There’s always going to be bacteria in milk, whether you kill it, or whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to be there. Milk is a breeding ground for bacteria. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a very good thing. Milk should ferment into a sour milk state or into something that becomes cheese. This is what has been done with milk for the vast majority of human history.

Noticing that made me want to understand the science and microbiology. If you have healthy animals that are not either transmitting diseases internally from their bodies or spreading them amongst themselves, the bacteria that’s living on their teats and going into the milk could be generally okay. People have been drinking milk made like this for a very long time generally by fermenting it and by not refrigerating to prevent it from fermenting. The cultural practice is to encourage it to ferment in a safe and predictable way into something that’s healthy and delicious.

That way of doing things is very much rooted in biology. There is a community of microbes that lives on the body of an animal that we could either distrust and try to disrupt it, or we could work with it and try to actually allow it to flourish and allow it to be a part of the milk that’s becoming the cheese, and potentially making the cheese even more a product of the place where it’s from if it’s being fermented by the microbes that are wild or being semi-cultivated in the spaces where we make cheese.

ARTY: But taking that one practice and putting it into a Western industrial setting isn’t advisable. The microbiome of the animal is in relationship to the microbiome of the environment and of the people working with the animals. So, in the environments that you visited, there are interrelated microbial communities whose diversity is the basis for food safety by creating a balanced and healthy microbiome in the whole system. That is quite the opposite of the toxic environments of CAFOs (Concentrated  Animal Feeding Operations).

TREVOR: That’s correct, and that’s what’s been broken. It is hard to have these conversations because I’m talking about systems that have evolved in a place and with a certain level of economy, comparing  them to the opposite extreme of dairy farming in America. In those situations, the way large herds of dairy animals are being raised puts stress on the bodies of the cows who are being forced to produce as much milk as possible. It’s not a healthy situation. It’s a situation that is ripe with opportunity for the spread of pathogens and illnesses.

So you can see why things like pasteurization, rigorous sanitation with harsh chemicals, and things like iodine dips have become standard because when you have a broken system that encourages the spread of disease, you have to take all these measures. It’s similar to applying chemical fertilizers, plowing, and planting a mono crop, you end up with a lot of pests and other problems that you have to use more chemicals to take care of.

I’m not advocating that we just kind of leave all of those modern protocols behind, but I want to see where the middle ground is between some of these more extreme situations that I’ve seen and the mess that is modern industrial dairying.

Cooking milk over a fire in India (photo courtesy of Trevor Warmedahler))

ARTY: You observed another example in Italy of how pastoral folks live with and use the microbiome of their whole environment. Christian at La Cascina del Finocchio Verde made cheese in the same room that it was being aged. If I have this right, that’s not a typical Western practice. How does that affect the process?

TREVOR: Christian makes a cheese that’s ripened for a very short period of time. It’s a small sheep milk cheese made with raw milk and no additional starter culture. By aging the cheese in the same space, the theory that I’ve come up with is that the room itself was kind of being a carrier for the yeast that’s growing on the cheese. The cheese is ripened mainly by yeasts and a little bit of white mold. These were thriving in the air and on the walls and on the cheeses themselves. So it was like once the new fresh cheeses came out and were salted, they were, in a way, immediately inoculated with this beneficial rind microbiome. So the cheese room itself becomes a carrier of this culture. It was the first time I had experienced that.

I’ve found this to be true in many situations, even situations where people are attempting to sanitize all their equipment. I think that these microbes are very resilient, and that, despite all our attempts to eradicate life from a space like this, we fail. And this mentality that we should treat a creamery like it’s a hospital has about the same results as treating a hospital like a hospital – it hasn’t done us very much good to have this delusion that we can sterilize life out of a space. It’s fraught with peril.

ARTY: Let’s talk about something that I think is near and dear to your heart and near and dear to your work, and that’s what you refer to as deep terroir. You talk about the distillation of the land into milk and cream. Can you explain that? What are the influences that develop a distinctive terroir?

TREVOR: That ended up being a big quest in the book, trying to understand if terroir in cheese is possible the way it is in wine. When it does occur, how is it happening? What are the mechanisms or the vectors for a cheese having a very unique taste of place? That was what I was searching for.

When I first found what I now call deep terroir, it blew my mind. Deep terroir means there’s a direct aromatic link between a cheese and somewhere on the farm–a barn or a creamery–a place that has the taste of the cheese, and that was at La Cascina del Finocchio Verde, the spot we were talking about earlier with Christian. I went out in the field with him and I put my hands in the dirt, which was kind of muddy in October, and I smelled the soil and it smelled like rotting leaves, grass, fungus, and sheep. Then I went into the creamery and put my face close to one of the cheeses and smelled almost the exact same profile. It was different. It was modified, but there was a continuity. So that hit me in a really big way, where it was like, okay, terroir definitely is possible. I’m experiencing it right now, and this cheese is beautiful; it literally tastes like the field that it came from.

I’ve come up with about four types of terroir sources. The first would be the landscape itself, the place where the animals are being raised, the pastures and the water. It also relates to the climate and the soil.

Sheep herding in Bulgaria (photo courtesy of Trevor Warmedahl)

Then there’s the livestock, who are the carrier of that terroir, who turn the landscape into milk. It is also  the breed and the type of fat and protein that that breed produces.

And then there’s the human culture, which is not only the recipes and the techniques for making the cheese, but also how they build the barns, how they farm, where they cut their hay, and what they do with the manure. Even the tools that are used to make the cheese, and the practices that are handed down through experiential transfer of knowledge, all these things are directly impacting the terroir of the cheese.

The fourth, the smallest fractal, would be microbes. All of the previous three are feeding into this microbial terroir, which are the microbes that are unique to a place or more likely a microbial community that’s unique to that place but made up of players that are found all over.

The microbial potential of raw milk is being steered by how humans are raising livestock in particular places into particular cheeses, oftentimes without an understanding that that’s what they were doing. That has led to cheeses that have these really unique tastes and aromas and textures. All of that makes up terroir, it’s a web of connections.

For me, terroir is a subjective feeling, it’s something that just kind of strikes me. I’m not going to try to define it any more than that because being in these places, eating the cheeses, and having the experiences that I’ve had has been the reward that I didn’t know I was seeking.

The industrial approach seems to be kind of the antithesis of terroir. If everyone’s using the same cultures, following the same kind of protocols, using the same equipment, then you’re eradicating the potential for unique communities of microbes to be thriving in these situations. You’re actually intentionally disrupting the flow of microbes from landscapes through milking barns into creameries and aging spaces.

ARTY: That’s the most comprehensive definition of terroir I’ve ever heard. In the book, you talk about the Western psyche, the feeling that people in the West do not quite feel at home on the planet, inherently predisposed to damage ecosystems. But in Italy, you saw grazing practices that actually nourished landscapes. In Norway, you saw grazing animals properly had created park-like conditions. Those are examples of foodways that can be immersed in functioning, healthy ecosystems.

TREVOR: Another angle that I’m always looking for is the potential of raising dairy livestock in a way that is ecologically beneficial rather than ecologically destructive. In some places, people are implementing these newer planned grazing programs Allan Savory-style, with a lot of electric fencing and regular moves, and pasture observation, and analysis and planning through those protocols. Those seem to work pretty well.

But what I’m interested in bringing to the conversation is places where it’s a little less planned and a little less controlled, where people are still moving animals on foot or horseback and are able to maintain ecological relationships in particular habitats and agricultural landscapes that have been built up over time involving livestock and maintained by these movements of herds and people. The main one that a lot of people are familiar with is transhumance, which is the movement of animals and people from a valley where they spend the winter, up to mountains in the summer where they have access to the alpine pastures, and their milk and cheese is made there. So quite often, those alpine pastures are actually being maintained by the fact that these animals are being brought up to graze.

In places where this tradition has been lost, you see forests encroaching on grasslands. That can be a negative thing.

What I’ve seen in places like Norway, Northern Italy, and Slovenia are these mosaic landscapes that include forests, meadows, and zones in between, with hedgerows or stone walls that create a unique habitat where plants and animals are seen that aren’t necessarily seen on either side of that line, or where a forest meets a meadow. Those places can be this very rich inter-exchange of biology, nutrients, etc.

The use of livestock tied in with other forms of agriculture, like orchards and growing crops can create landscapes that maximize the amount of these edges, creating more habitat for more animals, plants and microbes. That’s the ideal. I’ve seen it, but it’s been degraded in many places. But there is a resurgence happening. You see it especially in Europe where quite a few countries have now gotten UNESCO protection for transhumance and certain types of mountain farming and mobile pastoralism.

In the conversation around the impact of livestock on ecosystems and on the climate at large, I think there’s really important voices to be included from some of the countries that don’t get as much recognition.

Based on his extensive travels, Trevor shares his knowledge of traditional cheese making in The Sour Milk School typically held on a dairy farm. The 5-day workshops are a hands-on, immersive introduction to cheese-making from an alternative perspective.

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Threads of Resistance: The Women Reviving Peru’s Native Colored Cotton

If plants have shaped fashion’s past, could they also hold the secret to its future?

In The Nature of Fashion, Carry Somers takes readers on an epic journey through the plant origins of what we wear — tracing how the fibers that clothe us have transformed landscapes, cultures, and economies. Told through intimate human stories, the book uncovers both the devastation and beauty interwoven through the history of textiles: the exploitation of land and labor, and the resilience of those who continue to work in rhythm with nature.

This excerpt tells one of those stories. When Yolanda Contreras and a small group of women in northern Peru set out to revive their ancestors’ colorful native cotton, they faced skepticism, government bans, and the daily strain of survival. Yet their determination grew into a movement that restored biodiversity, reclaimed cultural heritage, and redefined what sustainable fashion can mean.

The following is an excerpt from Carry Somers’s new book The Nature of Fashion (Chelsea Green Publishing, November 2025) and is printed with permission from the publisher.

Some called it courage, others said it was recklessness when Yolanda Contreras gave up her job at the chicken factory, especially since she had a young family to support. It all started with the group of women she passed on the way to work: two o’clock every Tuesday afternoon, always there, deep in discussion by the side of the road. For weeks, Yolanda only glanced at them in curiosity. Then one day, she summoned the nerve to ask what they were doing. That’s when she heard about their dream: to revive the native cotton their forebears once grew, the cotton that sprouted brown and beige, yellow and orange, lilac and green – and perhaps black and blue. The plant they called simply algodón El País: country cotton. Yolanda felt an invisible thread tug her back to her grandmother, who had made clothes from seeds passed down like heirlooms. Yet it wasn’t just nostalgia that convinced Yolanda to join them. Coloured cotton was an opportunity, a means of escaping the drudgery of the chicken factory where every dead bird was docked from your pay. Yolanda hung up her apron and joined their crusade.

There was only one obstacle with growing such cotton – well, two or three it eventually turned out. The most immediate was finding seeds. The women searched high and low throughout Mór-rope, scouring every ditch and hedgerow, combing their homes and fields. Eventually they found a handful of seeds buried in the fluff of mattresses and pillows, and a few forgotten plants clinging to life in the countryside. Starting with so little felt like an impossible task, particularly as Yolanda had no idea how to cultivate them. The region has a desert climate and, with no irrigation in her field, she brought water in by donkey, digging holes one by one and carefully filling them with seeds. Some plants grew, others withered and died. But turning this handful of seeds into a livelihood wasn’t the women’s only battle because their husbands weren’t exactly cheering them on either, grumbling that they shouldn’t have given up their day jobs so hastily. Still, they persevered.

Just as their efforts were taking root, literally and figuratively, the Ministry of Agriculture arrived with orders to destroy their entire crop. There was a law, they explained, prohibiting the cultivation of native cotton. The government sees cotton’s promise, but their field of vision is confined to the commercial pima variety, which only grows white. Those native colours might cross-contaminate, muddying its coveted whiteness, shortening the extra-long staple fibres or harbouring pests that could damage the lucrative crop. And they might not, Yolanda thought bitterly as months of backbreaking work went up in smoke. Well, perhaps not quite all, because each cotton boll produces numerous seeds and it wasn’t hard to find a few escaped handfuls. This native cotton, this country cotton, this cotton the government disparages is proving to be a plant so tough it will withstand all attempts to eliminate it. Yolanda’s anger solidified into determination. She would not let them extinguish biodiversity and cultural heritage in a single swipe. If the law required her to grow white cotton, then that’s what she would do. She planted a field of pure white pima cotton, just like the government wanted. And in the middle, she grew her country cotton, her coloured cotton, her cultural heritage, wrapped like a secret within a veneer of conformity.

The women tended their crops, harvesting, spinning, storing, anticipating the day the world would catch up. After eight years they grew tired of waiting and invited the technical coordinator from the Ministry to come and inspect their plants. To the government’s surprise, these women had been right all along: native coloured cotton posed no threat to the white variety after all. In truth, it had some distinct advantages. While its staple length is short, native cotton is naturally resistant to the pests that plague commercial varieties. It thrives with minimal maintenance, requiring no fertilisers or pesticides, and the bushes can be harvested for up to six years. Unlike the monoculture of pima, native cotton is often planted as hedgerows to protect other crops from foraging animals. The government reversed the ban. Then they went further, officially recognising native cotton as the genetic, ethnic and cultural heritage of Peru. Yolanda and the other women had done more than rescue five colours from the verge of extinction; they had woven their efforts into history, reclaiming their cotton as a national treasure.

As Yolanda tells me her story, she sits on a woven petate palm mat, a strap around her back suspending her loom between her body and a nearby tree. Her shuttle moves to and fro, weaving alternating stripes of beige, brown and white. A young boy sits in the shade of her loom, while a girl sidles up to lean on her grandmother’s shoulder, absorbing the craft. Not that this is surprising – they’ve been surrounded by coloured cotton since the day they were born. In their culture, this fibre is for more than weaving. When a baby is born, the father will bury the placenta while the mother bathes herself and her baby with purple cotton. Then she wraps a pillow or hat made from brown cotton around the newborn’s head – no other colour will do. This cushions the baby’s soft skull against the nocturnal hooting of the great horned owl, which could easily split it in two. As the child grows, a loop of cotton around the ankle will ease leg pain, while a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol soothes toothache and mouth ulcers, always burned after use. A compress for bites, a remedy for fright, it seems there’s nothing native cotton cannot do.

Today the women’s group that met on the roadside every Tuesday has grown into a movement, encompassing not just her community but twenty others besides. With the money she earns, Yolanda has sent one of her daughters to medical school, while another works beside her growing cotton. As Yolanda pushes her bobbin through the warp threads, pulling the batten towards her to tighten a strip of rich chestnut weft, her heritage comes alive on the loom. Sometimes she thinks back to life in the chicken factory. But not very often.

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

For more than a century, the Klamath River has been at the heart of one of North America’s most significant environmental justice movements. Beginning in the early 1900s, a series of hydroelectric dams cut off salmon migration routes, destroyed fisheries, and devastated the livelihoods and cultural practices of the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath, and Shasta Nations.

In 2002, a massive fish kill on the Lower Klamath caused by low flows, high temperatures, and disease became a turning point. For Tribal communities, it was a moment of both unbearable grief and renewed resolve.

That resolve has carried through generations and is now transforming the river itself. The largest dam removal project in U.S. history began in 2023. The river now runs freely for the first time in over a century, signaling a new era of ecological and cultural revitalization led by the region’s Tribal Nations.

Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok attorney and former General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe, has been at the center of this fight. In her new book, The Water Remembers, she tells the story of her family’s 170-year struggle for justice on the Klamath — from her great-grandmother’s resistance during the Salmon Wars to her own role in securing the river’s restoration.

The following excerpt takes us back to the moment when that fight became deeply personal: the day Cordalis and her family discovered thousands of salmon dying in the river. It’s a heartbreaking scene, but what followed is a story of reclamation, resilience, and the enduring power of Indigenous leadership to heal a river and a people.

(Watch Amy Bowers Cordalis’ Bioneers keynote about the restoration of the Klamath River.)

“It smells like death,” Mike said, “some kind of organic decomposing. I don’t smell or see any chemicals, so it’s not a chemical spill. It seems to be only salmon dying.” There were no smaller fish, like trout, or larger fish, like sturgeon, dead. On the banks, the birds still flew and there were no visible dead animals. Only the salmon were dying.

“Should we pick the salmon up?” Merle asked, peering down into the electric-green water.

“How we gonna pick them up?” I asked incredulously. “Their gills and bellies are rotting, and the water looks toxic.”

The fish next to the boat were dead, their mouths clenched open and eyes clouded over. The sides of their bellies were wounded, the skin brown, red, and gray where it appeared to have burned and then rotted. My stomach turned, followed by my heart. Their gills were not their usually bright pink and instead were light gray with white spots. I was paralyzed and in shock by the sight. I felt extreme panic, devastation, and confusion. These were the fierce River beasts that I had battled for me and my family’s survival. I knew them as aggressive fighters who could break human bones with a whack of their tail or move their bodies back and forth to jump out of fishing boats. Now, they had succumbed to something so powerful it killed them en masse. What had killed them? How could we stop it?

Mike broke me out of my stupor. “This is serious, guys. Let’s go up the River. There are probably more.”

We turned a bend in the River near the glen. Merle pointed up the River.

“What is that? Do you see it?” He gunned the boat toward an eddy, where the water pulled in a circle and then shot out whatever it caught onto the riverbank. After which a five-hundred-foot straight stretch of River came into view.

“Oh my god,” I murmured as we got closer.

“Stop the boat, Merle,” Mike said somberly.

Before us, for the next half mile, were hundreds of dead salmon in the water and on the riverbank. Large salmon. Some were floating down the surface of the River and others got caught in the eddy, circling eerily. More had been pushed out of the eddy and were beginning to pile in layers along the riverbank, three to four salmon deep, their bodies distorted and tortured. Just like the first dead salmon we saw, here the salmon’s gills, rotted and gray, swelled out from their heads. They were white and filled with small white dots, tiny organisms that had sucked out the blood and oxygen that would have normally flowed through a healthy gill. Their bellies had exploded from the inside out, like they had swallowed a bomb. Blood and guts poured into the River. What skin remained intact was a dark red, a stark contrast to its normal silvery chrome color, and gray from rotting. The water where the salmon pooled was covered with a bubbling film, toxic blue-green algae, and a gray sludge that moved with the carcasses.

We stood in the boat staring, slowly moving upriver. There were so many dead salmon in the water. We didn’t want to run them over, but it was almost impossible not to. All three of us were silent, in shock. “No one touch anything,” Mike finally said. “This looks like ich, a fish disease. But in case it’s something else, don’t touch the fish.” “This is a massive fish kill. I don’t know how else to describe it,” Merle replied, staring out into the water. “What is going on? How did this happen?” “Why are they dying?”

“How do we stop it?”

We fumbled for words as our minds raced through a series of unspoken questions and fear of what could happen next. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I thought of all the fish stories and Yurok myths my family had told me. None of it made any sense.

This River was made for salmon. It was September, when the salmon migrated up the River. How could the salmon be dying here?

“There has to be a biological explanation for this,” Mike reasoned. “Some ecological reason. It’s a drought year. The water has been low for a while, and it got lower recently. It’s been hot, much hotter than normal.” “We’ve been catching a lot of fish over the last few days,” Merle noted. “We have a big allocation this year. It must be a big run. I think the bulk of the run is in the River now.”

“The water is so low it has been moving slow, almost stagnant. The water is hot too,” I said.

“The flows at Iron Gate went down 41 percent to six hundred cubic feet per second two days ago. The bureau probably cut the water flows to the River to give more water to the farmers. The US Vice President was in Klamath Falls two weeks ago to visit the farmers,” Mike said. “They must have reached a deal. They must have diverted the water. That would explain the low flows.”

We started the boat back up and continued up the River. The size of the fish kill grew as we traveled. Just fifty yards ahead, in another eddy, the same scene: hundreds of salmon dead, their bodies mutilated. The farther we traveled, the more salmon we saw lining the banks of the River. The sun was baking them, turning rotting fish into rotten corpses. The smell was so concentrated and potent, I gagged. “Here, put this over your nose,” Merle said, handing me a cloth. “Merle, let’s stop at my dad’s camp at Brooks Riffle and see if it’s the same there.” “Sure,” Merle said.

As we pulled around the last River corner before Brooks Rif- fle, two to three layers of dead fish lined the banks of the River for a five-hundred-yard stretch. They lay there mangled, battered, and bruised like a line of dead soldiers waiting to be buried. Yet the redwoods, alder, and willow trees all continued to stand tall. The mountains and the ridges towering over the River stood still. The birds still flew by overhead. The water still rolled toward the ocean, but it moved at a lethargic pace, quiet and solemn, as if in mourning.

If water has memory, it would remember this day. It would remember growing hotter, holding those salmon as they died, as they gasped for air, as the fish disease sucked the oxygen from the salmon and killed them. It would remember how it had failed the salmon, unable to provide them with sanctuary.

This excerpt is posted with permission from The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis, published by Little Brown and Company, October 2025.

Book Giveaway: The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis

Enter below by December 7, 2025, at midnight PT for a chance to win a copy of this phenomenal book!

For the Yurok people of Northern California, the Klamath River is life. It carries salmon, culture, law, and story. It is kin.

In her newly released memoir, The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life, Amy Bowers Cordalis — Yurok Tribal citizen, attorney, and water protector — braids personal history with collective struggle as she traces her family’s generations-long fight for salmon, sovereignty, and survival.

👉Read an excerpt from the book here.

When a devastating fish kill nearly destroyed the Klamath River, Cordalis stepped into a legacy of resistance stretching back more than 170 years — one shaped by her great-uncle’s Supreme Court case defending Yurok rights, her great-grandmother’s leadership during the Salmon Wars, and her community’s unrelenting defense of their homelands. As General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe, Cordalis helped hold powerful corporate interests accountable and helped lead the largest river restoration project in history.

Part memoir, part historical record, and part call to action, The Water Remembers is a profound testament to Indigenous resilience, relational law, and the commitment to defend the sacred.

Five randomly selected winners will receive a copy of The Water Remembers.

Scroll down to watch The Water Remembers: Year Zero, Amy Bowers Cordalis’ powerful talk from the 2025 Bioneers Conference, where she shares how Indigenous leadership and community action sparked a historic river restoration movement.


Amy Bowers Cordalis – The Water Remembers: Year Zero

⟹ Book Giveaway Official Rules

1. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED OR RESTRICTED BY LAW. THE SWEEPSTAKES IS SPONSORED BY BIONEERS/COLLECTIVE HERITAGE INSTITUTE, 215 LINCOLN AVE #202, SANTA FE, NM 87501.

2. Entry Period: “Book Giveaway: The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis” (the “Sweepstakes”) commences at 12:01:01 AM (PST) on October 28, 2025, and ends at 11:59:59 PM (PST) on December 7, 2025 (the “Sweepstakes Period”).

3. Eligibility: To take part in the Sweepstakes, participants must be legal residents of the United States or Canada (excluding Quebec, where the promotion is void), and at least 18 years of age at the time of entry. Employees (and their immediate families, i.e., parents, spouse, children, siblings, grandparents, stepparents, stepchildren and stepsiblings) of Bioneers and its giveaway affiliated partner companies, sponsors, subsidiaries, advertising agencies and third-party fulfillment agencies are not eligible to enter Sweepstakes. By participating in this Sweepstakes, entrants: (a) agree to be bound by these Official Rules and by the interpretations of these Official Rules by the Sponsor, and by the decisions of the Sponsor, which are final in all matters relating to the Sweepstakes; (b) to release and hold harmless the Sponsor and its respective agents, employees, officers, directors, successors and assigns, against any and all claims, injury or damage arising out of or relating to participation in this Sweepstakes and/or use or misuse or redemption of a prize (as hereinafter defined); and (c) acknowledge compliance with these Official Rules.

4. To Enter: Enter required information in the Giveaway Signup form above during the eligible period. Contestants may only enter the Sweepstakes once. If multiple entries connected to a single person or email address are received, only one entry will be eligible. All entries submitted in accordance with these Official Rules shall be hereinafter referred to as “Eligible Entries.”

5. Prize Winner Selection: 5 winners will be randomly selected from among all eligible entries received at the end of the stated period, or within a reasonable time thereafter. Winners will be responsible for all U.S. and State taxes and/or fees. No transfer, substitution or cash equivalent of prizes permitted. Winners will be notified by email. Sponsor is not responsible for any delay or failure to receive notification for any reason, including inactive account(s), technical difficulties associated therewith, or winners’ failure to adequately monitor any email account. The winners must then respond to Sponsor within 48 hours. Should a winner fail to respond to Sponsor, Sponsor reserves the right to disqualify that winner and select a new one in a second-chance random drawing.

Prize and estimated retail value: One hardcover print copy of The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life (estimated value: $30)

6. General Prize Terms: The value of Prizes may be taxable to Prize Winner(s) as income. All federal, state and local taxes, and any other costs not specifically provided for in these Official Rules are solely the Winners’ responsibility. Sponsor shall have no responsibility or obligation to a Prize Winner or potential Prize Winner who is unable or unavailable to accept or utilize the Prizes as described herein. The odds of winning the Sweepstakes depend on the number of Eligible Entries received. Noncompliance with any of these Official Rules may result in disqualification. ANY VIOLATION OF THESE OFFICIAL RULES BY A PRIZE WINNER OR ANY BEHAVIOR BY A PRIZE WINNER THAT WILL BRING SUCH PRIZE WINNER OR SPONSOR INTO DISREPUTE (IN SPONSOR’S SOLE DISCRETION) WILL RESULT IN SUCH PRIZE WINNER’S DISQUALIFICATION AS A PRIZE WINNER OF THE SWEEPSTAKES AND ALL PRIVILEGES AS A PRIZE WINNER WILL BE IMMEDIATELY TERMINATED.

The Sponsor assumes no responsibility for incorrect or inaccurate entry information whether caused by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilized in this Sweepstakes or by any human error which may occur in the processing of the entries in this Sweepstakes. The Sponsor is not responsible for any problems or technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer online systems, servers, or providers, computer equipment, software, failure of any email or players on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet or at any Web site, or any combination thereof, including, without limitation, any injury or damage to participant’s or any other person’s computer related to or resulting from participation or downloading any materials in this Sweepstakes. The Sponsor is not responsible for any typographical or other error in the printing of the offer, administration of the Sweepstakes, or in the announcement of the Prizes and Prize Winners. If, for any reason, the Sweepstakes is not capable of running as planned, including, without limitation, infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, fraud, technical failures, or any other causes beyond the control of the Sponsor which corrupt or affect the administration, security, fairness, integrity or proper conduct of this Sweepstakes, the Sponsor reserves the right in their sole discretion to cancel, terminate, modify or suspend the Sweepstakes. Should the Sweepstakes be terminated prior to the stated expiration date, notice will be posted on the Sponsor’s Web site and the Prizes may be awarded to winners to be selected from among all Eligible Entries received up until and/or after (if applicable) the time of modification, cancellation or termination or in a manner that is fair and equitable as determined by the Sponsor. All interpretations of these Official Rules and decisions by the Sponsor are final. No software-generated, robotic, programmed, script, macro or other automated online or text message entries are permitted and will result in disqualification of all such entries. The Sponsor reserves the right in its sole discretion to disqualify any individual they find to have tampered with the entry process or the operation of this Sweepstakes; to be acting in violation of these Official Rules; or to be acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner, or with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any other person or to have provided inaccurate information on any legal documents submitted in connection with this Sweepstakes. CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT BY ANY INDIVIDUAL TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE ANY WEBSITE OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THE SWEEPSTAKES IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS AND SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, SPONSOR RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES FROM ANY SUCH INDIVIDUAL TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. Entrants agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Sponsor from any and all liability resulting or arising from the Sweepstakes, to release all rights to bring any claim, action or proceeding against the Sponsor.

8. Privacy Policy: Bioneers and giveaway partners may collect personal data about participants when they enter the sweepstakes/when a winner is selected. Personal data may include: Name, email, address, home and office phone numbers and other supplied demographics-related information. All entrants will be automatically added to the Bioneers email list. They may opt out of emails at any time.

9. SPONSOR: THE SWEEPSTAKES IS SPONSORED BY BIONEERS/COLLECTIVE HERITAGE INSTITUTE, 215 LINCOLN AVE #202, SANTA FE, NM 87501.