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A trifecta of crises—accelerating climate change, a scarcity of affordable housing and escalating insurance rates—are threatening the one place where people usually feel secure: their homes.

“The cost of property insurance was a topic most people ignored, but it’s now a kitchen table economic issue for many families, and a risk factor for the housing market,” said Sarah Edelman, former deputy assistant secretary for single family housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Current homeowners are more likely to become delinquent on their mortgages after an insurance premium increase. Prospective buyers can’t find or afford homes. Developers can’t bring new units to market. And operating costs for landlords can reach an unsustainable level, Edelman said, with effects trickling down to real estate agents, the lenders, mortgage services—the entire housing ecosystem.

Compounded by climate change, the insurance crisis could destabilize the entire financial system, said Anne Perrault, senior policy counsel for the Climate Program at Public Citizen. ”In some ways, it’s just the beginning of a death spiral for some regions of our country.”

Members of the Indigenous Waorani village of Kiwaro looked skyward as a helicopter hovered over the rainforest canopy in the center of Ecuador and landed in a nearby clearing. Out stepped government officials, there to inform the community about an impending auction of oil rights on their land.

The Ecuadorian government announced earlier, in November 2011 from the capital city Quito, that it would open up for drilling millions of hectares of Amazon rainforest—including the ancestral territories of Waorani communities like Kiwaro.

Following the meetings, Ecuador’s then minister of non-renewable resources opened the oil auction, later telling the media that oil companies’ investments in Ecuador could be worth $700 million.

The paltry consultation process, and the threat oil operations posed to their lands and culture, galvanized Indigenous groups to fight back. In 2019, sixteen Waorani communities and a provincial ombudsman filed a lawsuit in a local court against multiple federal ministries, alleging that the communities’ rights to free, prior and informed consultation were violated.

“The average American,” Zuckerberg says, “has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.”

Zuck thinks AI should fill this demand. The future isn’t the Metaverse anymore. The future is Meta’s phantom AIs that will pal around with you and slake your thirst for social interactions. It’s like Mark Zuckerberg heard about Zombie Internet Theory and decided it was a feature, not a bug.

And I guess I’m just curious who possibly wants this future. Who is this for? Why? You have all the money in the world. Why can’t you focus on building something interesting? Or at least just stop degrading your own existing product?

I suspect Mark Zuckerberg’s phantom-friend-network will follow the same route as his ghost-town of a metaverse. He’ll spend tens of billions chasing a future that no one actually wants.

I do not want AI companions to replace or augment my actual friendships. That sounds hollow, pathetic, sad. A world where we have four times as many AI friends as real friends is a world where we have just, collectively, given up.

And I don’t think this is a radical statement either. A future filled with AI companions is plainly a dystopia to be avoided, not a benchmark to strive for.

When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn't want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – a flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals.

Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the Coopers' lawn is a different animal than her father's. It's in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over.

Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab, brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf out naturally. "It's easier in the sense that you don't need to be beating back as many weeds," explains Weaner Cooper. "The native plants came in so thickly that they outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we would have just made it brown."

It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed their vast front lawn.

https://archive.ph/fno9c

Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”

Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.

It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.

But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?

https://archive.ph/rIycs

Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative and Eastern Shoshone tribal member, he’s helped grow the number of buffalo on the reservation for the last decade. The latest count: the Northern Arapaho tribe have 97 and the Eastern Shoshone have 118.

“Tribes have an important role in restoring buffalo for food sovereignty, culture and nutrition, but also for overall bison recovery,” he said.

The Eastern Shoshone this month voted to classify buffalo as wildlife instead of livestock as a way to treat them more like elk or deer rather than like cattle. Because the two tribes share the same land base, the Northern Arapaho are expected to vote on the distinction as well. The vote indicates a growing interest to both restore buffalo on the landscape and challenge the relationship between animal and product.

The world has changed dramatically since the start of the second Trump administration. But how best to describe this shift? Many see it as potentially the end of American democracy, or the end of the Atlantic Alliance and the United States’ prime role in global multilateral institutions.

Here’s a less obvious take: maybe Trump’s ascent portends the end of Big Solutions. The latter have been necessitated by the eruption of Big Problems—i.e., global predicaments that are potential civilization killers, including climate change, worsening economic inequality, the spread of persistent toxins throughout the environment, and the accelerating loss of wild nature.

Meanwhile, can small solutions work? Many environmentalists have been promoting them all along. There is a rich literature on localization, degrowth, community resilience, and Indigenous attitudes and practices, and small environmental orgs have sprung up to further these strategies. Proponents of small solutions don’t claim that these actions will enable humanity to continue its current growth trajectory while canceling growth’s negative impacts on people and the planet. Rather, Small Is Beautiful promoters say we should preserve and repair as much as we humanly can of nature and durable human culture, and do this individually and in our households and communities, where we have the most agency. Small-scale, localized approaches can also build adaptive capacity and resilience as Big Solutions fail.

In the mid-1990s physicists Geoffrey West and Louis Bettencourt collaborated with biologists to study allometric scaling laws, where it is generally found that larger organisms are more efficient consumers of energy than smaller ones. After mathematically explaining these laws through fractal network effects, the researchers began applying them to the human built environment, particularly cities.

Certain environmentalists and sustainability advocates mistook the significance of these results, leading to decades of policy work and investments in urban growth that, West now admits, are doomed to fail.

The fact that so many, including the originators of the work, got this story wrong reflects the cultural blinders and techno-biases that typify most of us living in high energy modernity. Doing the opposite of our conditioned response to the overshoot predicament will likely lead to more favorable outcomes.

A huge 89% majority of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis but feel they are trapped in a self-fulfilling “spiral of silence” because they mistakenly believe they are in a minority, research suggests.

Making people aware that their pro-climate view is, in fact, by far the majority could unlock a social tipping point and push leaders into the climate action so urgently needed, experts say.

The data comes from a global survey that interviewed 130,000 people across 125 countries and found 89% thought their national government “should do more to fight global warming”.

The existence of a silent climate majority across the planet is supported by several separate analyses. Other studies demonstrate a clear global appetite for action, from citizens of rich nations strongly supporting financial support for poorer vulnerable countries and even those in petrostates backing a phase-out of coal, oil and gas. A decades-long campaign of misinformation by the fossil fuel industry is a key reason the climate majority has been suppressed, researchers said.

Prof Teodora Boneva, at the University of Bonn, Germany, who was part of the team behind the 125-nation survey, said: “The world is united in its judgment about climate change and the need to act. Our results suggest a concerted effort to correct these misperceptions could be powerful intervention, yielding large, positive effects.”

https://archive.ph/hR3ws

More EVs than ever are on the road in the U.S., with a surge in sales over the last five years. The number of public EV charging ports in the U.S. has grown more than 6-fold over the last decade, from about 30,000 in 2016 to nearly 196,000 in January 2025.

Most of the charging infrastructure for the growing number of EVs is through private at-home chargers. But public charging infrastructure helps make EV ownership more broadly accessible, while also making long-distance zero-emissions travel possible.

This brief examines the growth and distribution of public charging infrastructure in the U.S. over the past decade (2016-2025), including along popular road trip routes.

Global food systems are responsible for around one third of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Producing less meat, using less synthetic fertiliser, stopping food waste and integrating nature into farms are among the ways that scientists say can reduce environmental harms from producing food. However, some critics of these approaches note the possible trade-offs, such as lower yields compared to “conventional” forms of intensive farming.

Various terms are used to describe these more “climate-friendly” ways of farming. Some of these practices have set definitions and are evidence-based, while others are buzzwords whose meanings vary depending on the source. Many share similar approaches.

To break through the jargon, Carbon Brief has identified 25 commonly discussed climate-relevant farming methods and key terms.

When Angela Chalk first heard there were ways that ordinary people could offset flooding in New Orleans, she was skeptical.

Her neighbors in the Seventh Ward knew all about heavy rains that brought knee-high floodwaters, spilling into porches and marooning cars and homes, and were frustrated that it was something they felt powerless to stop.

Then she heard Jeff Supak, head of a nonprofit organization now called Water Wise Gulf South, talk about how simple fixes like rain gardens and vegetated ditches, also known as bioswales, could soak up extra rain.

A bioswale was installed alongside Ms. Chalk’s driveway, native species were planted, and clay in her backyard was replaced with absorbent soil.

During the next heavy downpour, Ms. Chalk looked outside. Storm water that previously had nowhere to go was seeping into the ground. She took photos and shared them with friends.

“What I saw at her home was a project that I had never witnessed before,” recalled one of the friends, Cheryl Austin, who works with a community organization, the Greater Treme Consortium. “I was so impressed.”

https://archive.ph/rkuYZ