Hello dear readers,

It’s been a moment. I have sat down to draft a note to you a half dozen times over the last five months, but I struggled to find the words.

Truth be told, I’m still looking for them.

What I can say for now is that the hiatus was a form of wintering, not an abandonment of the work. If anything, over the course of the last year, I have sunk even deeper into the work.

The more time that lapsed, though, the greater the pressure to write something that justified the long silence. But that’s not really the nature of things, is it? Winter doesn’t come to an end because it’s lived up to one expectation or another. That’s not how seasons work. Winter ends because spring arrives. And when spring comes, the task is to simply begin again.

Which is why I’m grateful to writer Angely Mercado for nudging my hand. She was awarded fellowships by The Uproot Project and the EEJI Summer Institute Journalism Fellowship with Wake Forest University to report on food sovereignty in the Caribbean for Hothouse last year.

Food connects us to place, history, and one another. Finding our collective way forward, building regional food sovereignty place by place, might entail revisiting the structural and cultural forces that shaped the diets we’ve adapted to, so that we might reimagine the kind of menus that serve both our taste buds and our communities. Food is a reminder that culture can be made, unmade, and remade again to reflect the values of our choosing, from the labor we choose to grant prestige to the recipes we reach for.

The following is Angely’s work.

It looks like it’s already spring.

More soon,

Cadence

Editor-in-Chief

Planting seeds in Puerto Rico 🌱

By Angely Mercado

Angely Mercado is a writer and fact checker based in NYC with bylines in Teen Vogue, Nonprofit Quarterly, The Body, Hothouse, and more. She has roots in the Caribbean via her family in both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. This article is dedicated to the memory of her uncle, Francisco “Tuto” Mercado David who passed May 2026. He was one of the first people to ever lecture her on the importance of farming, and rain.

It’s early March. Driving up to Maritza del Rosario López Cortés’ coffee fields in Villalba feels like travelling into the sky. We’re in the central region of Puerto Rico, surrounded by what feels like endless waves of mountains that only go higher and higher. The car groans and sputters, so my dad and I park and attempt to walk the remainder of the way. At around a half mile above sea level, it’s somewhat cool and windy. Ideal conditions for growing coffee.

López Cortés finds us slightly winded on the side of the road in her pickup truck.We make the rest of the way together. “Glad I found you two,” she laughs while driving. “It’s still steep walking up.” She wasn’t wrong.

There’s a small shed with a bathroom and a green flag on a nearby tree representing the municipality. In the distance, the rolling hills around us felt like an endless emerald sea. She usually harvests the coffee beans around December. Year-round, she also grows a variety of starchy vegetables, like plantains, and herbs for making sofrito—a Caribbean mirepoix of sorts, made up of culantro, or cilantro, and lots of peppers, onion, and garlic. It’s used to season food for cooking on the archipelago. López Cortés beams with pride as she points to the plantain bunches on trees that grow alongside the bumpy red clay road that circles the property.

“Sometimes I don’t have to buy certain produce from the supermarket as often,” she says in Spanish. “I get to take platanos home with me, and everyone at home gets to eat from that one tree.”

López Cortés is one of many smaller farmers popping up in a U.S. territory where as much as 80 percent of the food consumed comes from the outside. She sells the coffee to relatives who roast and package it in Puerto Rico. The archipelago is seeing a burgeoning local farming resurgence. Small growers and community organizers are pushing for local food to reclaim land, their identity, and sense of security.

Relying on outside food also makes Puerto Rico vulnerable to supply chain shocks that come with the kinds of extreme weather events intensified by the climate crisis. Whenever docks are damaged by storms, or ships delayed, communities wait longer for food shipments. Hurricane Maria in 2017, for instance, famously pummeled the region with wind speeds of more than 150 miles per hour. Residents throughout Puerto Rico waited and saw food supplies dwindling at the time. Major supermarkets had to throw away perishable items. Longstanding power outages meant items like meat spoiled and were disposed of by major retailers like Walmart, Politico reported in 2018.

Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, a food systems researcher and writer based in Puerto Rico, says interest is growing in food sovereignty among organizers, growers, and others.

“I see food sovereignty as having agency over our food systems,” Rodríguez-Cruz explained. “And you’re hearing that phrase in more food and organizing spaces these last few years. It’s making people reclaim traditional recipes and it’s making people care about local agriculture.”

He feels that because so many people have had to experience food waste from constant outages following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, residents have seen the repercussions of having so many necessary goods be imported.

“[Maria’s] like this ‘aunt’ that never goes away,” he said jokingly. “But it taught us a lot.”

How an island made up of hills of emerald green stops growing its own food

There’s a long history as to why Puerto Rico moved away from growing much of its own food. The Taínos, the people indigenous to Puerto Rico, once cultivated the archipelago’s vibrant mountainsides for starchy root vegetables, known as viandas, legumes, and culinary herbs. Colonialism and plantations saw the displacement of the cultivation of these subsistence crops for cash crops intended for exportation. The green mountainsides were repurposed for sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. In July of 1898, U.S. troops invaded during the Spanish-American war, taking over a territory that had been under Spain’s rule since the days of Christopher Columbus and Juan Ponce de León.

For much of the first half of the 20th century, major companies produced sugar throughout the archipelago, but production declined as production became cheaper elsewhere. In the 1980s, Puerto Rico still produced a little over 40 percent of its food. Despite being warm most of the year and having varied climates and rich soil composition, Puerto Rico has succumbed to the fate of many islands today—producing very little of its own food and importing the rest.

Colonialism and, later, industrialization worked in tandem to dismantle local food production as well as shape the archipelago’s taste toward more processed food.

During the Transatlantic slave trade, Spanish and British ships arriving in Puerto Rico’s harbors to pick up sugarcane molasses to distill into rum in New England arrived with merchandise of their own—often salted and tinned Cod fish. Despite Puerto Rico’s oceans teeming with fish, Cod would become a new staple of the Puerto Rican diet, a cheap protein that kept well under the tropical sun to feed the island’s enslaved populations and the growing settlements in the Caribbean. It’s now a regional staple. I eat massive amounts of it with viandas during Lent, and I have often shared massive bacalaitos (flour and bacalao fritters) with my siblings at the many patron saint festivals, street fairs, and sporting events we’ve attended in the Caribbean over the years.

Later, as Puerto Rico made the transition from an agricultural economy to one run on industry and tourism, cultural habits around food shifted further. Operation Bootstrap, a government effort to industrialize the island in the 1950s, moved a sizable portion of the population from the countryside to the cities to work in new factories. Under industrialism’s pressures for convenience, Puerto Ricans increasingly reached for imported processed food made of cereal grains and adopted a diet increasingly composed of meat.

Where 45 percent of Puerto Ricans cultivated the land as recently as 1945, by 2019 fewer than 2 percent did. These figures closely mirror the wider trend of agricultural vocation; in 1900, farmers made up 40 percent of the American labor force. Today that figure has dwindled to less than 2 percent.

Rebuilding a labor force is a thing of its own. Many young professionals have left Puerto Rico for better financial opportunities. According to data from the Pew Research Center, the archipelago’s population declined by about 17 percent after peaking at 3.8 million people in 2004.

Then there are the rules that govern how food enters the archipelago. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, otherwise known as the Jones Act, requires that any goods shipped between U.S. ports, Puerto Rico included, must be transported by U.S.-owned and operated vessels. This is more expensive than shipping from another country, where shipping and labor costs may be lower than in the U.S. As a result, consumer prices are raised.

This has made food even more expensive in a place where residents already struggle with rapidly rising rental prices and displacement by wealthy newcomers and Airbnb listings. Puerto Rico also has a high sales tax of 11.5 percent, which increases the burden of shopping for families in a territory where the median household income in Puerto Rico was about $26,200 in 2024, compared to about $80,000 in the U.S. according to Census data.

Where Puerto Rico’s table goes from here

Proponents across the Caribbean increasingly see small-scale, sustainable farming as an answer to the kind of dependency ingrained by centuries of colonialism, industrialization, and trade regulations. Sometimes referred to as agroecology, it’s a lower impact kind of agriculture, where practitioners consider themselves stewards of the land—mindful of water consumption, waste reduction, and abstaining from pesticides, practices that minimize impact and simultaneously leverage the natural landscape.

And though farmers like López Cortés wouldn’t frame their work using vocabulary like ‘food sovereignty’ or agroecology,’ she has seen firsthand the power of having access to locally grown produce, as well as the space to grow her own. Aside from tending her own crops, López Cortés is a hairstylist. Past shipment delays to Puerto Rico have limited clients who wanted to dye their hair specific tones because she couldn’t get ahold of the right products. This, alongside disruptions from storms, was one of several ‘ah-ha’ moments for López Cortés.

“It made me realize that too many things come from outside,” she said. “If there’s a holdup or a problem, everything is impacted and we just have to wait around.”

In the event of climate-related future supply chain disruptions, where food can’t reach the archipelago, Cynthia Burgos López, the executive director of La Maraña, a San Juan-based nonprofit that focused on Puerto Rico’s sustainable development, explains local food will be all that’s available in those moments of duress.

“It’s really important to support local food production, because when we have a disaster, the first points that are impacted are the coast, and everything gets in through the coast,” she said. “By producing food locally, you’re part of the whole cycle.”

Other advocates see small farms as a way to address the persistent food insecurity across the Caribbean as well as protect biodiversity and cultural legacy—all issues amplified by climate-related weather trends, like more intense and more frequent hurricanes or droughts.

Some burgeoning support systems, and just as many challenges

Angel Mercado was one of the small farmers that I interviewed to get a sense of how challenging this work is. He lives in the Santa Ana area of Coamo, and is semi-retired after years of working in factories in New Jersey. I found out on my way to his home that he’s one of my many extended family members. My father grew up in Santa Ana in a large family and spent much of his childhood helping raise chickens and growing food. Several of my aunts and uncles still live in that area. I once told an uncle that I was bored, he handed me a bag of gandules to shell by hand and I never complained again.

He farms as a hobby and calls himself an ‘agricultor frustra’o’, a frustrated farmer.

The many fruit trees, and vegetables, and potted plants with cilantro and onions feed Mercado and his wife. He sometimes sells the root vegetables and legumes he grows to people he knows or to smaller markets, and sometimes he gives them away. They also raise chickens for eggs. He picked and shared several guavas and sent me home with a few fragrant leaves for tea as we walked around his property. You can see hills, and beyond that, the blue stripe of the Caribbean Sea.

“You see that big tree over there,” he said, pointing at the other side of his field. “I planted that when I was a teenager.”

When Hurricane Maria barreled through, he lost everything. Mercado pointed to a field of grass and told me that he once had a lot of yucca and gandules—pigeon peas—growing there. An old photo on his wife’s cellphone shows neat rows of plants growing in the sun. I asked if he knew of any government subsidies or support for his work.

“That’s for people who have an official business,” he told me as he organized yucca roots that he planned to sow for a future harvest. “But I lost all of that crop and I was supposed to sell it. I had a few buyers already. But it was all gone, there was nothing left.”

There are organizers who are trying to fill in the gap. One group that has focused on making it easier for people to grow their own crops is El Departamento de la Comida (the department of food), a support hub in Caguas, Puerto Rico.

El DEPA was first founded in 2010. At that time organizers connected with local farms to sell and distribute to customers every week. A couple of years after its founding, organizers launched a restaurant and kitchen that sold produce, cooked meals, and housed local events like urban gardening workshops and music shows.

The nonprofit has since expanded its programming to include classes that bring in collaborators and teach others about composting useful crafts. Some of their local events include cooking classes and support. The goal is to empower community members to learn about growing their own food and to feel pride in cultivating the land. The events and workshops also serve as support for anyone who is curious about growing their own food locally, but don’t often know where to start.

I travelled up to Caguas from my family’s hometown in Coamo during one of my trips back to Puerto Rico. The route is winding road after winding road and there’s no cellphone service in the area. Organizer Carolina Otero Correa showed me around the location. Walking into the community center, I find a library of gardening books, information pamphlets for local farmers, and a wall with rows of farming tools, like shovels and rubber boots of various sizes, that community members can rent out. Out back are potted plants, food storage, and an area for hosting community events.

“We always invite people to come and check out our tools,” Otero Correa told me as we walked through. “We do this on an honor system.”

El DEPA buys products from local growers and sells the products they make at their small store that runs out of the community center. There’s a kitchen in the back with large refrigerators and a dehydrator. Options for sale that day included mango fruit leather neatly rolled and packaged, sachets of chili flakes, and a package of turmeric powder for around $5. While I was touring the space, a community member stopped by with her niece to say hello. I noticed her fingertips were stained turmeric yellow.

Other organizations take a different approach in their mission to support local farmers and fisheries. Burgos López at La Maraña explained that the organization distributes funding and finds local farmers in need by word of mouth. The organization created a food sovereignty fund and distributed thousands of dollars to support local growers after damage from Hurricane Fiona in 2022.

“We have this network of people that are part of our program, and we call them after disasters and ask ‘Is everything ok, do you need something?’” she said. “They’re dealing with a lot of risks—there’s flooding, wind if it’s in the coastal areas. But, if it’s inland, they’re more prone to landslides.”

Burgos López credits La Maraña’s efficacy in serving rural farmers, urban growers, and fisheries to thinking holistically and their constant effort to expand their network. Their work and monetary contributions help fill in a gap, she explained, where local food producers had different needs and were sometimes left out of the conversation.

“The Department of Agriculture will focus on large scale production, so these fishing villages or small agroecological farmers were not being supported, so we decided to focus on this,” she said.

But support groups and nonprofits are facing an added layer of challenges—funding opportunities are harder to come by as the federal government continues to fire federal employees and defund programs.

El DEPA had been one of many organizations that had applied for agricultural grants that were made available to nonprofits under the Biden administration. According to Otero Correa, El DEPA had received funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that would have supported operations for a handful of years. That funding was cancelled by the Trump Administration in 2025 alongside hundreds of other grants.

“[We think] this happened not just because we’re openly environmentalists, but we’re also really vocal about community inclusion,” Otero Correa said in Spanish as she showed me El DEPA’s garden space.

Otero Correa confirmed that El DEPA does receive non-government funding for their work. The organization’s website mentions donation options for individuals. But it was a blow to see the federal government cancel anticipated funding that would have supported more local growers and collaborators in and around Caguas.

“We invested a lot of our resources in making sure we were in compliance so that we could receive the funding,” she said. “And then it was cut.”

While non-profits and small farmers struggle to navigate bureaucratic paperwork to access funding for their endeavors, larger corporations in Puerto Rico, like Bayer, formerly Monsanto, enjoy the same benefits as an individual farmer. The corporate entity is entitled to 90 percent tax exemption and free water, not to mention nearly $3 million in wage subsidies to sweeten the deal.

Officials and government agencies often leave some small growers behind. For example, following Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s former Secretary of Agriculture, Carlos Flores Ortega, promoted state-led solutions. One initiative touted increasing the accessibility of fresh cut fruits and vegetables at grocery stores, to help make healthy options as convenient as processed ones. Another pushed for increasing corporate agriculture on the island in the hopes of doubling agricultural production. These proposals have been met with some resistance, though, with critics arguing corporate agriculture defeats the purpose of food sovereignty, and feel that it benefits big businesses more than it supports local communities.

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López Cortés managed to receive government funding and loans a few years ago to buy more equipment to support her work, but it was a process that involved documenting everything and signing paperwork with a lawyer. Though the process was tedious, the support was a welcome change. She and her family members no longer had to manually haul the coffee beans and other crops on a wagon. Before getting ahold of better equipment, cultivating the coffee beans and other crops took more manual labor.

“We even crawled and dragged stuff from the plants in order to reach the road,” she laughed. “We did it however we could do it honestly.”

This makes direct grants and funding from groups like El DEPA and La Maraña so much more important for providing everything from money to equipment for smaller farmers and newer food production businesses—especially for a U.S. territory where trade and shipping regulations make farming equipment more expensive to import.

Other U.S. territories have also invested in educating residents about their right to local food and finding pride in traditional ingredients. Like Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands import most of their food despite being warm most of the year.

I connected with Olivia Walton, an environmental educator on St. Croix, who has worked to help students feel connected to their surrounding environment by learning about local food in the Caribbean. For several years she ran a summer program with the St Croix Environmental Association, a nonprofit that focuses on climate and conservation education. Her approach includes helping students think critically about why so much of the food they like is canned, or from chain restaurants like McDonalds, as opposed to local fish or staple starches like breadfruit. She also helps her students connect local food to extreme weather events they and their families have experienced.

Learning about local food systems has encouraged some of Walton’s previous students to become curious about their own family’s history. After one of the summer programming’s activities centered on local fish, she witnessed two siblings express an interest in their father’s work in a way she hadn’t seen expressed prior.

“One of the sisters was just so fascinated, and actually was now more interested in marine biology, and wanted to go out with her father when he goes fishing. And to me, that was really cool to see that, like, immediate interest in a topic,” Walton said.

Shaping taste

The move away from locally grown produce has shaped the food culture for several generations of people living in the Caribbean. During a trip to the Caribbean last year, I asked my cousin’s elementary-school-aged son what his favorite Puerto Rican food was. His response? He loves empanadas de pizza. And, to be fair, these empanadas are everywhere and are a cheap and delicious handheld food. But they’re less of a traditional fritura and more of a great symbol of how local diets have changed and folded in other ingredients and imported influence over time. Burgos López says she’s had a similar experience going to schools and speaking with children there.

“You will ask them ‘What is your favorite food?’ They will tell you ‘grapes’ or ‘a strawberry’,” she recounted. “For me, I’m like, ‘What happened? How did we get here?’”

I’ve timed trips to visit family and to report there during certain fruit seasons. I’ve picked tamarind on trees growing alongside a bridge in my family’s hometown. Neighbors have given me mangoes from their trees. I’ve sent long texts to friends lamenting that I visited too early for passion fruit season and only found a single ripe fruit. There’s a wealth of tropical fruits sometimes hard for me to find in New York City. I’ve spent months dreaming of sun-ripened quenepas from the trees I grew up climbing. Those summer break months spent shelling gandules, helping pick panapén and fruit were in part the seeds of my own curiosity about food systems.

And the growing local food movement isn’t necessarily a rejection of the fusion foods that are now staples in the Caribbean. Burgos López says that a local food movement could spotlight ingredients that are from this region of the world.

“For me, the best fish that you can find on this island is on the West Coast. [It’s a] tuna, and they don’t serve it enough in restaurants here, but it’s so amazing,” she said. “The ocean here is full of fish.”

Rodríguez-Cruz’s own relationship to food has changed over time too as he’s learned more about food sovereignty. Some of the traditional meals like viandas were something that Rodríguez-Cruz had always thought of as food that older relatives turned to. But he thinks the growing local food movement has pushed people to reclaim some of those dishes.

There are signs pointing to an awareness and appreciation for locally produced items. While shopping at a Walmart in Santa Isabel, I saw a small produce section with papaya and pineapples and a sign that read “apoya a la industria local”, support local industry. Nearby a shrink wrapped piece of squash showcased a label that read “hecho en Puerto Rico,” made in Puerto Rico. The rest of the produce wasn’t labelled like this.

For some small farm owners, they feel a sense of joy and pride that they can make it work as a food producer. One of these such enterprises is Daisy Santiago’s Farm in Coamo, not far from where many of my family members live. The owner, Feliciano Santiago Mateo (Danito), beamed when he explained the business name.

“Daisy is my wife,” he said in Spanish, laughing.

Mateo has a hydroponic farm that grows greens that he sells to small markets, bakeries, and restaurants in Puerto Rico. I spent a morning watching him and his employees work earlier this year. Operations are carried out in a small house with tools for germinating seeds before they’re transferred to the hydroponic stations. Next to the small house are several tents with rows of tubes with cutouts to hold the growing plants. The business is working on expanding its merchandise.

“We mainly grow cilantro and lettuce and now we’re working on growing peppers and other herbs like rosemary and spices, too,” he said as he walked me around the tents.

When he started working on this business, it was just him and his wife. He has since seen operations grow enough to take on a few workers. Mateo proudly showed me his water tank filled with tilapia and the small pepper plants lined up in a corner of a tent.

Mateo was excited when I shared that I had been interviewing others passionate about local produce. He recalled growing up in Coamo, where so many families around him produced some food of their own.

“When I eat anything that’s grown here [in Puerto Rico], I’m also helping people that are from here,” he said. “It’s fresher, and I’m helping my country’s economy. And that’s worth it to me.”

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Reporting for this story was supported by The Uproot Project & the Wake Forest University fellowships.

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Sometime back in 2022, when Michael Coren was still building Hothouse with me, he once remarked how I seem to just ‘see’ things—from editorial taste or direction to business ideas. Others have commented on how I seem able to put words to things that make the intangible and abstract, concrete and vivid. I imagine I have my father to thank for much of that.

With that, this Earth Day, I am going to share something a little different, something more personal—a piece I wrote in honor of my Dad, a man more in tune with and reverent of the natural world than anyone I’ve ever known.

My father, Dr. Gregory Peter Bambenek, passed away last month, on March 26, in Duluth, Minnesota. Because his story has shaped so much of my own, and thus, by extension, Hothouse, I think it’s important to share his story with you.

My father was many things: a psychiatrist by trade, a naturalist by passion, a scientist and an inventor, and a bit of an archivist.

Growing up, my Dad accompanied his father, Hubert “Hub” Bambenek, on his days off in Winona, Minnesota, to catch catfish commercially on the banks of the Mississippi by summer and to trap fox and mink in the dead of winter. My grandfather, himself an avid naturalist, taught my father well. He, in turn, taught me.

A couple of years ago, my father was sending me links to old home videos. Clicking one, it took me to a grainy and sun-soaked recording of myself at age 6, holding a mushroom cap plucked from the stem. I could hear my father’s voice in the background: he was teaching me about mycelium, the underground network of tender threads that mushrooms use to communicate and transport nutrients.

In many ways, the clip gets to the essence of my childhood.

Our father imparted his passion for science and the natural world to my three brothers and me.

Each spring, we waited for the first temperature fluctuations to tap for Maple syrup. Come June, we made the long drive to southern Minnesota to forage for morel mushrooms. We learned which plants were edible, which were medicinal, and which were poisonous. In the winter, my family fished on ice and trapped beavers along frozen rivers.

We learned how to read the smallest details to understand the environment around us, like how tender ramps pushing up through the earth are always the first sign that winter is finally subsiding in northern Minnesota. We were taught to study the profile of the woods as we navigated deeper—to note natural markers, like an eagle’s nest or a sole birch tree in a forest of poplar, so as to not get lost, and to use the high-tech tool of the digits of our own hands to track in 15 minute increments the light left until sundown.

I also want to share my father’s story with you because, in several ways, I believe elements of how he lived his life are climate solutions, too. His oral storytelling of adventures and mishaps, for instance, had the potential to shape the lives of anyone willing to listen, opening them to curiosity and awe. His openness to indigenous and Eastern knowledge systems created space to question the conventional, while his eagerness to educate and expose any children within his orbit to the natural world planted a seed; studies show that exposing children to the natural world has the strongest correlation with creating adults who care about protecting the environment.

I also believe sharing his story with you is a kind of climate solution of its own. Remembering and honoring the legacy of people and place is one way we reground ourselves and see beyond our own noses, to remember that we are custodians of land and memory alike for generations yet to come. This mirrors an Indigenous concept known as the Seven Generation principle, which urges individuals to carry the knowledge and wisdom of past generations forward for the stewardship of the next seven generations.

Telling our stories and revisiting history may not stop us from making the same mistakes. But it gives us a map to how we wandered off course—and that map, if we’re paying attention, might just help us find our way back.

When I was a little girl, I used to think that all cities were made sitting on a hill overlooking a Great Lake. Why would I not? Driving around Duluth growing up, Lake Superior was always within sight, gleaming up at us from the bottom of the hillside.

It wasn’t until I got older that, to my surprise, this turned out not to be the case. Very few cities, in fact, are sitting atop a hill overlooking a Great Lake.

And the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on how that memory speaks to something true about my Dad, too.

You see, I think for anyone who had the chance to meet my father, Greg Bambenek, Dr. Juice, they probably knew right away that there was something about him. But I think for me, as his daughter, that’s only coming into clarity for me over these last months and years. Because you see, for me, he was simply my father. The same way I grew up thinking that all cities were planted on top of a hill, you don’t always think about who someone is when they’re simply a fixture in your life.

It’s simply the water you’re swimming in, the air you’re breathing.

Of course, my father invented a fishing scent and took the Vikings out for Salmon and Lake Trout on Lake Superior. Of course, he conducted anthropological research with medicine men in Belize and Mexico, studied acupuncture in Taiwan, and researched marijuana use in Vietnam on behalf of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. When the U.S. was landing a man on the moon, he was traipsing around Nepal, India, and Egypt. Of course, he was a beautiful guitar player, an excellent chef, a steadfast gardener, and could go deep on any topic.

It’s not until grief shifts the focal point of your lens those last few notches that everything comes so sharply into focus.

It turns out it’s not every day you get a father born in 1947, a world traveler, anthropologist, entrepreneur, and psychiatrist all rolled into one.

As one young man put it, our father was a man who never learned to sit still. Son of a hairdresser and a fireman, trapper, and commercial fishermen on the banks of the Mississippi, Dad was a Renaissance man—as close as the world might ever come to a cross between a real-life Indiana Jones, a walking encyclopedia, and a relentless inventor. I can vividly recall him always tinkering in his garage late into the night when we were growing up, right below my room. He was relentlessly curious about the advancement of science, and I know he would have loved to see all that humanity has yet to accomplish.

This is all to say, I inherited, or just as likely, learned, more than a few quirks from our Dad. I think we all did.

From my Dad, I inherited an intrigue in China, violin, guitar, travel, an interest in science, and my way around a camera, thanks to a red, yellow, and blue colorblock plastic film camera one Christmas when I was about 8.

One more intangible quirk I inherited from our father, in particular, would be an ability to see the interconnectedness of everything. The trouble with that is, when you can see the interconnectedness of everything, you can see everything, all the possibilities. And when you see all the possibilities, you want to pursue all of the possibilities.

And that he did. It was a running family joke that Dad was always ahead of the curve by a decade or two—from biodegradable fishing lures to underwater fish speakers. And we have the archive of home videos on YouTube from the early aughts to prove that he was convinced videos were the next big thing, well before TikTok blew up.

He embraced the validity of Indigenous shamans, medicine men, and acupuncture, long before Western medicine caught up, defending the legitimacy of Mexican shamans even in his final weeks. He understood and saw the validity of the unconventional and the ancient long before modern medicine and knowledge were ready to contend with that reality. He had a reverence for nature and wildlife foreign to our modern times. Growing up hunting, he taught us to sprinkle tobacco over the body of any deer whose life we took, giving thanks in the way the Ojibwe always have.

This quality also made him hopeless at prioritizing. This was true right up until the end. He had finances to take care of and a book project he and I were working on together. Instead of working on these things, he figured out how to make ice cream out of the milk and sugar he was supplied with at assisted living. I had made the mistake of introducing him to Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream a couple of months prior; he’d never had such a thing, and he was in love. So he absorbed himself trying to recreate that Half Baked ice cream flavor in the comfort of his own apartment. Never mind that I brought him resupplies of actual Half Baked ice cream on the regular. He just wanted to be experimenting and conducting science, right up until the very end.

And while I share his relentless curiosity, I like to think I’ve gotten a little better at prioritizing than he ever did. He acknowledged as much himself in the last few months, “I never really did figure out prioritizing. I just kind of always pursued everything.” Maybe he never had to learn to prioritize; somehow, he was simply able to do it all, until he wasn’t able to anymore.

Even as his lack of prioritization skills finally seemed to catch up with him, he was so fully engaged in life, shaping the world right up until the very end.

Ten years ago, at 67, my Dad was still trekking around China and Thailand with me, eating deep-fried scorpions (I could never), and riding elephants. Not two weeks before he passed, my Dad proposed a different kind of trip. He asked me if I wanted to take psilocybin mushrooms together. Mind you, my father and I had, of course, discussed psychedelics throughout my life; he was Dr. Juice, after all, but he’d never before proposed we actually take them together. But that’s just the kind of man he was—always ready to go on one more adventure.

We never did get to take that trip together.

But I think that’s part of his story, too. He was always down for one more adventure, one more trip, one last experiment or idea.

The night he entered the hospital, I was sitting with him telling him a story idea I’d like to write for a magazine, and he was giving me ideas on immunologists to reach out to to interview. I told him about book ideas and talks I’d like to give. He was even consulting me on what medications to take as I was navigating for my own health journey up until 72 hours before his passing. And he certainly didn’t let the fact that he wasn’t a journalist stop him from proposing astute ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into my career as a journalist these last few months.

Our Dad could’ve lived one hundred lives and he would have filled them all up to the brim.

In one of our final days together, Dad played me old home videos on the screen in his assisted living apartment. In one scene, I’m scrambling up steep cliffs in Lake of the Woods to collect blueberries; in another, Connor, Dad, and I are at the tallest heights of a ski jump in Northern Michigan. I don’t look so comfortable with the height. In the next video, we’re spelunking deep in some mine shaft, and, in yet another, Connor is playing with a garter snake twisting in his hands, and I’m right there with him, interacting and petting the snake. What stands out to me in that video, and the rest of them, really, is how timid I look. It’s evident I’m quite scared of the snake and uneasy with the great heights.

Watching these old videos, I realized my Dad's greatest gift was teaching me to do things, even if afraid. He was always right there, making the unknown feel approachable, welcome, even.

It’s something others have remarked about me as an adult. For those who don’t know me, I’ve spent most of the last 8 years pursuing a career as a journalist in New York City. Fed up with traditional media, four years ago, I co-founded a journalism endeavor to report on climate solutions, which I now operate solo, called Hothouse. But others have often remarked on my bravery for the way I’ve approached my life—for the gall I had to simply move to New York with less than a few thousand in savings and no real work lined up, or my decision to gallivant around Southeast Asia solo.

They’ve remarked at my bravery, but it’s never felt like much to me at all. And I’m imagining I have a great deal to thank my Dad for in that department, that he taught me to simply do things regardless of fear, to push my boundaries. I’m sure there’s a double-edged sword, and this trait comes with a little more pain than if I had learned to simply trust my fears and doubts. But then I might have shied away from the world; I wouldn’t have dove headfirst, straight into the deepest waters, and experienced life as raw and real as I have.

I know I live my life more fully, for he was my Dad. I know we all do.

Our Dad is the reason I’m as weird as I am. A little bit feminine, a little bit masculine. Drawn to aesthetics and esoteric questions alike. Our father is the reason I’ll probably never care about traditional markers of success; he showed us a way of seeing the world that is so far off the beaten path, because he was eager to take us there, to show us the entire world.

When I was a little girl, he encouraged me to follow in the footsteps of his good friend, Bob Briggs, and become a dentist or maybe an orthodontist. And Bob was cool, Bob had his own single-prop plane, which he once took Dad, my twin Connor, and me up high in the air.

I think when I exhibited interest in writing from an early age, writing poems or short stories, my Dad was frustrated or anxious about what kind of security that future could offer me.

But he failed to understand that not only did he instill in me the confidence that I could do anything I wanted, irrespective of how much it terrified me, but he equipped me with the very raw ingredients to pursue writing to begin with.

You see, my Dad was an excellent storyteller. Nothing gave him greater pleasure on this planet than telling a good story. So if he was anxious about my proclivities, I’m afraid he only had himself to blame. When I was little, Connor and Parker would usually fall asleep a little earlier than me during weekends at a cabin on Crow Lake or out camping along Lake Superior’s South Shore.

And, in those late evenings, I’d make my Dad tell me stories. About warriors in China who used straw men to collect the arrows from outside attacks, about Taoism, about alien sightings, about asteroids, and about life on Mars.

And today I realize that when I research and write, his voice and presence come through in my curiosity and the delight in the telling. My writing is now another way he lives on. As is Parker’s passion for the outdoors, Connor’s adeptness at tinkering, and Jacob’s thirst for adventure.

I spent two of Dad’s last nights with him at the hospital, sleeping in the cot. The night before he passed away, he was up at 3 a.m. I played him some Beatles music videos to soothe him. As I was drifting back to sleep myself a little while later, I had the most visceral feeling of a dog licking my face, a sensation so strong that it woke me up. It felt like warmth and sunshine. I’d never had such an overwhelmingly vivid dream before. I’d like to think that it was Quincey, our Red and White Irish Setter growing up, offering reassurance from the other side.

I’m not religious, but my Dad made me open enough and with enough humility to believe that we don’t know everything that we don’t know.

For most of your life, your family is simply there. There’s not much need to break out each component and turn it over in your hands.

But grief has a funny way of acting like the focal length on a camera. Over the last few months and years, the meaning our Dad has had in my own life has been slowly coming into focus. And it’s as if losing him was the lens at last clicking into place, until everything becomes crystal sharp.

I had the privilege in the last few months of articulating some of what he meant to me directly to him, but I wasn’t prepared for all that would click into place once he was finally gone.

I can’t speak for my brothers, but at least for me, he took a little girl, timid in the world, and made her relentlessly curious and unflinchingly unafraid.

Of course, that kind of unabashedness has its costs. I’ve had more than my share of heartbreaks and heartaches, maybe I’ve been a little too open, a little too curious about the world at times. But I don’t have many regrets because my Dad empowered me to pursue my own self-actualization to its very end.

That said, at one point or another, I think our father had contentious relationships with each of us. Anyone who knew my father knew he was a stubborn man. He also taught all of his kids to be so independent and to question everything, including him. We made a joke at his bedside the afternoon before he passed, about how he was loving but always so stubborn, and about how he should have thought about that before raising such independent kids.

Even if it went against his personal interests, he raised us with the tools to navigate this world on our own.

Jacob is 45, Parker is 34, and Connor and I just turned 30. It’s something I’ve long known was coming, but it still feels like a tragedy to lose a parent so young. But if anyone equipped his children with a lifetime of wisdom, tools, and knowledge before he had to go, I’d say our Dad did.

And I know he touched lives well beyond his own kids. He was a mentor to young men, ones oftentimes unconventional, creative, outdoorsy, or entrepreneurial in their own right, just like him.

Dad was obstinate and brilliant and always welcoming. He had a contagious enthusiasm for life, and he always had the capacity for others—he was a good listener and reasoned through situations like a good detective.

In the last few weeks, I asked him why he listened to my ideas when others often might be quick to dismiss my perspective as a tad paranoid. And what he said simply stopped me. He said, “I just think through the things you say and they make a lot of sense.” He saw me.

If it’s not clear by now, he was my thought partner. I will miss my thought partner, co-conspirator, and best friend, in all his wild relentlessness.

He was an amazing teacher and storyteller, but somehow, curiously, not always the best communicator.

We talked about the messiness of human relationships a lot in his last few months and years. How easy it is to make mistakes in the moment, how there’s oftentimes such clarity in hindsight that we would’ve traded anything to have had in the moment.

It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? He was full of contradictions. But our worst qualities are oftentimes simultaneously our best qualities. I’ll miss our deep discussions about philosophy and people and ideas, but maybe not about politics. There are some bridges we can’t always cross.

I recently lamented to a friend over the phone that the friends I’ve made as an adult in New York City will never know my father, and she said, ‘True, but would they ever really have understood?’ And she’s right, I don’t know that anyone could ever convey the reality of who our Dad was in words alone. He was someone you had to experience.

When I was a little girl, I didn’t know Great Lakes weren’t a fixture of every city.

I didn’t realize how far out and singular our father was, either.

But I think Dad would have liked that idea about all cities being built atop hills overlooking shimmering lakes. Because, in his world, possibility stretched far and wide, beauty was always just around the bend, and nearly anything could be over the next hill.

◆ I hope this piece offers a glimpse into half of the lineage that shapes my thinking and inspires you to reflect on the legacies that shape where you came from and inform where you are going, too. Happy Earth Day 🌎

◆ If you feel so inclined, memorials are welcome to erect a bench along Lake Superior’s North Shore in my father’s memory 🌼

◆ If anyone has insights into book publishing they’d like to share for the book I’m working on for my Dad, I’m all ears: cadence@hothouse.solutions 💌

Hello, dear Hothouse readers,

I’m still digesting the new administration and the devastating L.A. Fires. I imagine I’m not alone.

Given everything January threw at us, I’m working to pull together a dispatch to help us navigate the months ahead.

In the meantime, before current events entirely eclipse recent memory of the L.A. Fires, I wanted to share this critical story by Capital & Main. This reporting previews lessons from the housing crunch unfolding now in Los Angeles County following the fires. Capital & Main is a digital publication investigating power, money, and politics. For more overlooked stories and coverage by them, you can sign up for their newsletter here.

Sincerely,

Cadence Bambenek

Editor-in-Chief

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Maui’s Post-Wildfire Housing Crisis Offers a Warning for Los Angeles

After wildfires devastated the island, homelessness spiked. Advocates fear L.A. could face a similar fate without strong renter protections — and enforcement.

By Jack Ross

It wasn’t the images of flames ripping through neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Altadena this month that really triggered Jordan Hocker’s anxiety. It was the flood of social media posts about rent-gouging in nearby Los Angeles County communities that appeared in the days that followed.

Hocker lived on Maui when wildfires destroyed as many as 4,000 housing units in August 2023, leveling the town of Lahaina. But as an organizer with the Maui Housing Hui, a tenant advocacy group, she has been dealing with the ensuing rental crisis ever since.

After the fires, state officials moved swiftly to freeze most rents on the island and issued emergency orders halting evictions. But the measures failed to curb an alarming trend. Maui residents who lived or worked in the burn zone have seen rent increases of roughly 50% in the months following the disaster, according to research from the University of Hawaii. Some landlords took advantage of the crisis, evicting tenants to make way for higher-paying renters. A year later, homelessness in Hawaii had nearly doubled.

Hawaiian housing advocates and researchers say Maui’s experience is a cautionary tale for L.A., highlighting the need to pass — and then enforce — renter protections after a natural disaster disrupts an already tight rental market. How Los Angeles leaders respond is still an open question, and a battle is currently being fought between activists and politicians over strengthening renter protections. L.A. tenant organizers, already skeptical of officials’ ability to enforce the state’s price-gouging law, have also begun cataloging alleged violations themselves in a spreadsheet that now sports more than 1,400 entries.

Hocker said the activists are right to be vigilant. “Unless there are aggressive teeth on price-gouging [laws], it will happen. People will do it,” she said.

The Palisades and Eaton fires, which broke out on Jan. 7, have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, left at least 29 people dead and razed more than 10,000 homes in a county with a severe homelessness crisis. Rents in L.A. County have since increased an average of 20%, the Washington Post found, with rents in some neighborhoods closer to the burned areas more than doubling. For years, Mayor Karen Bass has said L.A. needed a “FEMA-style response” to the homelessness crisis; now it needs two. (Pacific Palisades is part of the city of Los Angeles, though Altadena is not.)

The fires have spurred local leaders to protect L.A.’s renters. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency the morning of the fires, activating a preexisting price-gouging law that imposes a 10% cap on most rent increases. The cap will remain in effect through March 8 unless it is extended. Landlords who break the law face up to a year in jail and fines of up to $10,000. They could also face civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has already filed charges against an L.A. County landlord and sent warnings to 500 hotels and landlords accused of price-gouging. District Attorney Nathan Hochman, whose recent election campaign was backed by the real estate industry, has also pledged to prosecute violators and warned gougers that they would be “publicly shamed.”

In Hawaii, officials similarly promised to crack down on rent gougers. And in the wake of the fires, Gov. Josh Green took decisive action, freezing rents and prohibiting landlords from evicting Maui tenants for unpaid rent. Even threatening a renter with an illegal eviction could be a punishable offense, with civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day. (The Maui eviction moratorium is set to expire on Feb. 4.)

But Green’s emergency proclamations contained various loopholes. Tenants could not be evicted for nonpayment of rent, but landlords were not required to renew leases once they expired. Some tenants could also be evicted when an owner or their family member moved in, or if the property was sold. Meanwhile, landlords were free to raise rents as much as they wanted following an eviction. They could also pass “any additional operating expenses” on to tenants as rent increases as long as they were documented, though what an operating expense might be was not specified.

Rents have risen on Maui by 10% to 20% since the fires, according to University of Hawaii economist Justin Tyndall. The increases were even higher for people who lived, worked or owned a business in the burn zones, according to a survey conducted by researchers Trey Gordner and Daniela Bond-Smith, also with the University of Hawaii. New, unpublished data they shared with Capital & Main shows those rents rose by more than 50%. Like those who lived in the burn zone, people who worked there also experienced “substantial displacement” from their homes, Bond-Smith explained.

Rent increases were even higher for fire-impacted families renting homes with three bedrooms or more, who saw increases of up to 80% or more, Gordner said. He attributed those increases to the pressure that the loss of so many single-family homes put on the rental market. A lot of single-family homes were also destroyed in the Palisades and Eaton fires, “so I would expect a similar pattern to occur” in Los Angeles, he said.

Natural disasters that destroy homes often lead to increased rents. Researchers with the Brookings Institute surveyed rental trends in major markets following natural disasters and attributed increases of between 4% and 6% directly to the disasters — an effect that “never fully went away,” one of the authors wrote. Other research found permanent rent increases too. Evictions also tend to rise.

Alan Lloyd and Alana Kay, who helped run a tenant complaint hotline after the fires with the Maui Tenants and Workers Association, said they received scores of calls from tenants whose landlords were using loopholes to raise rents or force them out and charge more to the next tenants.

“When renters’ leases would [end,] landlords would say, ‘Well if you want to continue living here, you have to pay me $600 more a month,’” said Hocker of the Maui Housing Hui. “I call it ‘housing by extortion.’”

Some landlords even forced out tenants to instead rent to fire refugees, who could pay more because FEMA was covering the rent — and dramatically overpaying, ProPublica and the Honolulu Civil Beat reported. It was not the first time FEMA has incentivized evictions this way, but it typically does so in rural areas or islands with even more limited rental markets than L.A., said Noah Patton, disaster recovery manager with the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

While advocates raised the alarm about evictions and illegal increases, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez “held property owners accountable in relatively few cases,” ProPublica and the Civil Beat reported. The office still hasn’t issued any penalties for landlords found to have broken the emergency proclamations, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, Toni Schwartz, confirmed in an email. They received 247 complaints and found 35 violations, which were all corrected, she wrote. (Forty-one claims are still being investigated.)

In Los Angeles, tenant advocates were already frustrated before the fires with government agencies tasked with enforcing renter protection laws. Prosecuting hundreds of landlords for price-gouging “would be unprecedented,” said Faizah Malik, a housing attorney with the pro bono firm Public Counsel.

And protections from price-gouging are weaker in Los Angeles than they are in Hawaii. California’s price-gouging law caps rent increases at 10% (with additional restrictions on new listings), while Hawaii officials froze rents. Furthermore, L.A. lawmakers have not halted evictions for nonpayment of rent. While Pacific Palisades and Altadena burned, L.A. County eviction courts stayed open.

Meanwhile, the city’s progressive organizers and politicians are trying to generate momentum for a rent freeze and an eviction moratorium. Last week, the L.A. Tenants Union disrupted a County Board of Supervisors meeting to demand the adoption of such measures. The City Council will vote Wednesday on a motion to freeze rents and halt nonpayment evictions for renters who claim financial or medical hardship from the fires. It’s unclear if the motion has the votes to pass.

L.A. tenants have one advantage that renters in Hawaii did not: a spreadsheet cataloging alleged incidents of price-gouging compiled by tenant activists with The Rent Brigade, a new collective organized by Chelsea Kirk and Philip Meyer.

The document is a tool rarely available to agencies charged with enforcing price-gouging law, according to consumer protection attorney Marissa Roy.

Roy worked on consumer protection lawsuits for the affirmative litigation division of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, which is one of the agencies tasked with enforcing the price-gouging law.

“They’re asking the right questions and compiling extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive information to build these cases in a way that lawyers don’t necessarily have the capacity for,” she said.

For now, activists are operating under the assumption that the government won’t come through. A study by The Rent Brigade found price-gouging across the county, from affluent Malibu to working-class Koreatown.

“Frankly, I have no faith that all the landlords who have committed price-gouging are going to face consequences, because, historically, they never do,” said Kirk. “I hope I’m wrong.”

Hothouse is a climate action newsletter. Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

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Happy New Year!

We hope you’re celebrating it with a couple of loved ones. 🎆

2024 is drawing to a close, but there’s still time to support critical climate journalism by making a tax-deductible donation to Hothouse by midnight.

Through Hothouse’s participation in NewsMatch, your contribution will be doubled dollar-for-dollar—up to $1,000 per individual.

Beyond the dollar amount, the number of individual donors is also a key metric when we approach funders. Having many individual donors signals an engaged and supportive community, meaning every $5, $10, or $20 you can contribute makes a material difference to our work.

Don't miss this opportunity to double your impact!

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Thank you again to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who continue to believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Here’s to a fruitful 2025, 🌸

Cadence Bambenek

In case you missed the, a couple of Hothouse dispatches to close out 2024:

• How I tied a personally destabilizing earthquake housing experience in New York to the larger climate picture we all face.

• A taste of Hawaii’s regenerative travel movement by Michele Bigley.

• And some really excellent syndications exploring the climate cost of AI and offering a bit of hope in the dark.

Got any questions? Feel free to reference this NewsMatch FAQ or give me a shout: cadence@hothouse.solutions

Hothouse is a climate action newsletter built on reader support.

Dear Reader,

We’re nearly at year’s end. That means there are still a few days left to make a tax-deductible donation to a climate-solutions organization making a real impact in your communities. For the past few years, we’ve partnered with Giving Green, a nonprofit aimed at simplifying your route to donating to nonprofits tackling climate change. Giving Green’s climate shortlist will help you find charitable contributions that will go the farthest to advance promising climate solutions.

This year, Daniel Stein, the founder and director of Giving Green, will also give you insight into what the climate nonprofit space will look like under President Donald Trump. Trump—who famously promised to “Drill, baby, drill!”—has previously denied the impact of climate change due to human activity. It stands to reason that many people and communities working in this space are alarmed by the election of Donald Trump. But Stein is hopeful that philanthropic donations to climate-change organizations may be boosted during the forthcoming Trump administration.

Happy holidays, dear reader. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. — Tekendra

P.S. Enjoy what you’re reading? Click here and subscribe to support this work for the long haul!

There’s still time to make a tax-deductible donation to a climate-solutions organization

Giving Green helps donors make a real impact with their giving by sharing research-backed recommendations. Check out their list of organizations to support!

By Angely Mercado

Giving Green is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping donors maximize the impact of their contributions to climate-related initiatives. The organization conducts rigorous research to identify and recommend high-impact climate solutions, such as nonprofits and advocacy groups that are effectively addressing climate change.

“Our approach is that we have a staff of researchers working full time, always trying to figure out what we think the most impactful philanthropic opportunities are, and this is constantly changing based on changes in the market and changes in policy,” Daniel Stein, the founder and director of Giving Green, told Hot House.

The results of the election may also boost some philanthropic support for clean energy organizations. Stein said he has spoken to others in the space about the potential for a “Trump bump.” There have been several shifting definitions for this bump, including one connecting the former president’s re-election to the stock market. Back in 2016, this bump was attributed to a spike in the stock market. Additionally, in 2016, progressive nonprofits saw a boost in donations after Trump’s first election.

“We have yet to see whether it's going to be real… I do think you have some people feeling frustrated, and they think, ‘What can I do? I can still give to these advocacy groups,’” Stein explained.

He pointed out that he understands some will worry about potential environmental rollbacks, much like the ones during the first Trump administration, when officials dismantled an alarming number of rules governing clean water, clean air, wildlife, and more.

But there is still so much potential for climate action going forward. Transitioning to cleaner energy is a global effort that the incoming administration is a part of. At the end of the day, if we avoid a doomist mentality and support movements and organizations that are doing the work, we’re doing our part to keep the U.S. in the clean energy transition.

Stein understands that supporting organizations—even for causes you believe in—can feel intimidating, especially when money is involved. He emphasized that the way to create systemic change in 2025 and beyond is to have many people working together.

“We [Giving Green] really are a conduit for lots of small donors to make a difference,” he said. “We have a massive range of donations—from millions of dollars to literally 30 cents. We put all that money together, and we try to deploy it in ways that can have a big, transformational impact.”

At a loss for whom to support this year? Stein said donations can also be sent to the Giving Green Fund, which experts use to redirect to organizations that need the money the most.

Ready to support climate and environmental solutions? Giving Green has some 2024 recommendations:

Clean Air Task Force

This international nonprofit was founded in the mid-1990s and focuses on policies and scalable technologies that help lower greenhouse gas emissions and clean up our air (hence the name). Yes, this organization was recommended last year too, but for good reason. CATF has a successful track record of working throughout the U.S. and internationally. For example, the organization played an important role in the Global Methane Pledge, introduced by U.S. President Joe Biden and EU President Ursula von der Leyen in 2021. The pledge, signed by more than 100 countries at COP26 that year, outlined that signers agreed to collectively reduce methane emissions by 2030.

The latest: Going into the new year, CATF will model the full U.S. transportation sector to better analyze the impact of emissions and fossil fuel demand. This will help the organization develop new policies to tackle emissions in this sector. Why does this matter? This sector is a significant source of air pollution throughout the U.S.

Donate

Future Cleantech Architects

This Germany-based think tank focuses on decarbonizing sectors that are notoriously hard to transition, including heavy industry (think manufacturing metals for building and construction) and aviation. The organization educates lawmakers on mitigation strategies for these hard-to-transition sectors and helps design decarbonization policies that bring about systemic change.

The latest: Future Cleantech Architects intends to double its size and increase its capacity to support decarbonization policies throughout Europe in the new year. EU countries are aiming to lower their emissions by more than 50% by 2030. Supporting organizations focused on challenging sectors will help ensure these ambitious goals are met.

Donate

Good Food Institute

The Good Food Institute uses a variety of tactics, such as policy and corporate engagement, to move the food system away from conventional livestock products toward lower-pollution alternatives. The organization makes connections across the food industry to support smaller alternative protein startups and connects with large agri-food companies to encourage investments in protein products. GFI supports plant-based products and the development of “cultivated meat,” which is sourced in a lab from animal cells rather than slaughtered animals.

The livestock industry, especially beef production, is tied to widespread deforestation of important and fragile ecosystems worldwide. It’s an especially dire issue in the Amazon rainforest, where millions of acres have been cleared for cattle ranching. And the world’s taste for livestock products is projected to increase, even though this sector urgently needs to change to lower global emissions. GFI is internationally plugged in, with offices around the globe, including in Europe, South America, and Asia.

Need more convincing? This organization was recommended as a top one to donate to by Giving Green in both 2022 and 2023.

The latest: Alternatives to traditional meat products—especially cultivated meat—are still being tested and developed. To expand on this research and help companies shift to greener practices, GFI is working to reach its three-year fundraising goal of $125 million. This fund will allow the organization to launch more offices.

Donate

Industrious Labs

Industrious Labs focuses on heavy industry, including the production of building materials like cement and steel. The organization works to increase media literacy about these industries and partners with communities. It also offers open-source data and industry analysis to help the public better understand the environmental impacts of industrial manufacturing.

Giving Green’s assessment highlights that, although heavy industry accounts for approximately one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, it is often overlooked by government policy and philanthropic organizations.

The latest: Industrious Labs is a relatively new organization that is still expanding. Donations will help it continue making connections to decrease the environmental impact of industrial manufacturing. The organization also has goals to eventually work on campaigns for decarbonization in adjacent industries.

Donate

Opportunity Green

Opportunity Green is a United Kingdom-based organization that aims to help cut emissions in the maritime shipping and aviation industries. If you’re asking yourself, “What is maritime shipping?” know that most products purchased online from abroad are shipped into the U.S. via vessels (aka boats).

Aviation and shipping are hard to decarbonize, so Opportunity Green works on strategies like building relationships in the private sector to promote alternative fuels that create lower emissions than fossil fuels.

The latest: The organization is expanding its strategies for the new year, including pushing private-sector companies to use greener fleets that require less fuel and can run on alternative fuels. Opportunity Green also wants to support policies that would reduce the demand for frequent air travel.

Donate

Project InnerSpace

Project InnerSpace is a nonprofit working to meet future energy demands by tapping into geothermal energy. It focuses on mapping ideal locations for drawing from this energy source and creating funding efforts to attract investors and decrease geothermal project costs.

What exactly is geothermal energy? It is energy produced from underground heat, which can be used for generating electricity and warming homes. This heat comes from underground water and steam that can power turbines.

The latest: Developing geothermal energy is highly dependent on location, so having an organization that can map potential areas for development is crucial for expanding this energy source. Donating to Project InnerSpace will support the organization in working with stakeholders to build demand for geothermal energy projects. The organization has launched offices worldwide and plans to open more, including in Brazil in 2025.

Donate

This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Dear Reader,

As I write this, Cadence is traveling back home, and I’m packing my bags to fly out next week. However, we have a very special issue for you today.

If you read our newsletter earlier this month, we offered some food for thought (pun, unfortunately, intended) on how to make your holiday eating more sustainable. That issue was written by chef and journalist Caroline Saunders. Caroline has graciously allowed us to repost her recipe for an upside-down cake for your holiday meal.

If you make it, we’d love for you to share pictures of your holiday creations with us. With your permission, we’ll share them with our readers. If you decide to use Caroline’s tips for your own holiday meal, share those with us too!

Happy eating, dear reader. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. — Tekendra

P.S. Enjoy what you’re reading? Click here and subscribe to support this work for the long haul!

Solutions blueprint: How to make your holiday eating climate-friendly

Plus, a recipe for sustainable upside-down cake to get you started.

By Caroline Saunders

Make Your Holiday Baking Climate-Friendly

• Prevent food waste by making dessert. Some of the world’s tastiest treats — from bread pudding to twice-baked almond croissants — began as thrifty ways to use leftovers. Train yourself to see spare ingredients in the fridge as the beginnings of something sweet: cooked rice could become an orange-scented rice pudding, and crushed-up Danish butter cookies could make a mean pie crust.

• Bake with plant-based ingredients. Not every dessert can be recreated with vegan ingredients, but plenty can. (This four-ingredient chocolate mousse is a case in point.) And remember: Sometimes there’s a culinary advantage in choosing recipes that call for plant-based ingredients. Making an upside-down cake for your holiday meal? Recipes that use oil instead of butter result in a moister cake that doesn’t dry out after a day (or when chilled).

• Experiment with climate-friendly flour. While subbing out all of a recipe’s all-purpose flour can majorly alter texture and flavor, microdosing alternative and whole-grain flours is generally safe. Substitute up to a quarter of the regular flour a recipe requires with another type, like einkorn or oat flour. Both have a mild flavor and are stocked in most grocery stores. This is an easy hack for agrobiodiversity, climate resilience, and health, too.

Recipe: Any Seeds & Nuts Upside-Down Cake

This orange-scented upside-down cake does it all, environmentally speaking. It prevents food waste by upcycling the contents of the nearly empty bags of nuts in your freezer that you refuse to throw out, and it’s plant-based — two carbon-saving moves. It also calls not just for all-purpose flour but for a portion of some other flour, too (use whatever’s in your pantry!), since branching out from the world’s most widely grown wheat is good for climate resilience.

Inspired by Alex Testere’s mixed seed upside-down cake, this sustain-ified version pairs a cake perfumed with orange zest with a seedy, nutty olive-oil caramel.

Use whatever nuts you have on hand: Raw or roasted seeds and nuts like pecans, walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, and poppy seeds are all good places to start.

(A word to the wise: if you have fennel seeds, use them! Your kitchen will smell like a holiday in Italy.)

Serves: 8

Ingredients — Topping

• 15g (1 tablespoon) olive oil

• 8g (1 packed teaspoon) orange zest, from about three-quarters of a medium orange

• 14g (1 tablespoon) orange juice

• 53g (¼ cup) brown sugar

• Pinch of salt

• 40g (⅓ cup) mixed nuts, finely chopped

• 8g (1 tablespoon) mixed seeds

Ingredients — Cake

• 180g (¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons) sugar

• 12g (2 packed teaspoons) orange zest, from about one-and-a-half medium oranges

• 14g (1 tablespoon) orange juice

• 60g (¼ cup plus 2 teaspoons) olive oil

• 200g (¾ cup plus 1 teaspoon) plant milk, unsweetened

• 150g (1 ¼ cup) all-purpose flour

• 30g any other flour (volume amounts vary by flour)

• 1.5g (¼ teaspoon) baking soda

• 3.5g (1 teaspoon) baking powder

• 1.5g (½ teaspoon) kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 325°F (162°C). Line a nine-inch cake pan with parchment paper, making the paper circle slightly larger than the diameter of the pan so there’s a small lip (this will keep the caramel from sticking to the pan). Spray the interior of the pan lightly with baking spray.

Make the topping. In a small saucepan, whisk together all the topping ingredients except the nuts and seeds until smooth. Cook over medium heat, whisking frequently, just until the mixture reaches a simmer, about 1–2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the nuts and seeds. Spread the nut mixture in a thin, even layer over the bottom of the prepared cake pan.

Make the cake. In a large bowl, toss the sugar and orange zest together gently with your fingers until the mixture is sandy and fragrant. To the same bowl, add the orange juice, olive oil, and plant milk; whisk until well combined. In another bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until the batter is smooth. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 30–40 minutes, or until the cake springs back when poked gently in the middle (or a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean).

Wait three minutes or so, then invert the cake and gently peel away the parchment paper. Allow it to cool to room temperature before slicing. The cake will keep, tightly wrapped, for up to five days.

Notes: I’ve tested this cake with portions of oat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, einkorn flour, and hazelnut flour. Let me know what you try! (You could also use exclusively all-purpose flour, in which case you’d use 180 grams.)

Big shout-out to Philip Khoury, whose Earl Grey loaf cake recipe I used as a starting point for my recipe development. I eventually added more moisture, more acid, used different leaveners, and baked at a different temperature in a different pan to evolve the cake from a domed loaf to a flattish, slightly more open-crumbed single-layer cake — and used different flavors. His book A New Way to Bake filled a big gap in the world of vegan baking formulas and has made recipe development like this far more achievable.

This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Before we dive into today's reflection, a quick reminder: it's Giving Tuesday! As a nonprofit newsroom, Hothouse relies on the support of readers like you. Consider making a donation or subscribing today.

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A personal note

Working from home on April 5th, the morning of the 4.8 magnitude earthquake in New York City, I was jostled by shaking. Through the mirror hung on the opposite wall, I watched my bedroom’s window panes flex, twist, and distort, like something out of a funhouse. The shaking was violent enough, I attempted to evaluate what to do — was it better to evacuate or to stay put?

After 15 long seconds, though, the shaking finally subsided, and everything seemingly returned to how it was. Yet, over the ensuing weeks, my health began to deteriorate.

The primary symptom was extreme insomnia. At night in bed, I would feel an intermittent sensation of a rocking boat as I lay waiting for sleep to come. During the day, waves of nausea would randomly wash over me. Soon, I was inexplicably struggling to stay hydrated, let alone nourished.

The sleep deprivation and lack of clarity in thought left me struggling to meet fact-checking deadlines, let alone with the capacity to figure out what was happening to me.

This would go on for six weeks before I finally figured it out.

Walking down the street next to my apartment one morning, I noticed fresh, fine cracks spider webbing across all three visible sides of the apartment’s foundation, including two deep horizontal cracks directly below my bedroom.

Back in my room, I conducted a simple experiment: I set a glass of water on my desk. The contents of the glass ever so gently — but constantly — rippled, confirming my hypothesis: the earthquake had compromised the structural integrity of the building's foundation. Every passing car on the heavily trafficked street below triggered vibrations that reverberated through the apartment complex.

As things would work out, to my dismay, the city’s only response was to fine my landlord and order him to patch and paint over the cracks that had newly appeared in the building’s facade. The city’s mandate managed to be simultaneously both unnecessarily punitive and merely cosmetic; I was still left completely out of a home.

An opportunity to come together

It’s no secret climate change will make the earth under our feet increasingly unsteady. Whether it’s a slow burn that erodes our health or a biblical-level flood that wipes away our homes, as happened in North Carolina, at precisely the moment our own lives are thrown into the most chaos, we will need to be able to depend on one another.

Yet this experience left me with the distinct impression that we have little sense and are ill-prepared for what’s coming down the pike.

By now, we’re all familiar with the idea that climate change will increase the severity and frequency of natural disasters, including earthquakes. But I don’t think we’re ready for what that actually means. When I multiply the health effects and lost productivity and income that I alone experienced this last half a year and multiply them by the billion people anticipated to be impacted by natural disasters by 2050, I’m almost paralyzed. I am overwhelmed to imagine that our own needs will grow at the same time that the systems in place to support us are stressed and possibly pushed past their capabilities.

I’m beginning to suspect that the under-acknowledged effects of extreme weather events are more widespread and longer lasting than we can imagine, even while many of us still grapple with accepting whether or not climate change will directly impact us at all.

As Michael Coren, formerly of this newsletter, wrote in the Washington Post this September, “Most people think climate change is happening. Relatively few think it is happening to them. Just 42 percent of Americans believe global warming will personally impact their lives, according to a 2023 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.”

Many of us still imagine these things happening on a shore far away. But was I not a privileged individual living in one of the most prosperous cities in the Western Hemisphere? And I’m not alone. A recent Gallup poll research suggests more than half of Americans have been touched by an extreme weather event in the last five years.

In my own life, the aftermath of the earthquake touched the climate problem in more ways than can be described in a single takeaway or thread. The experience has been yet another reminder of just how crucial family, friends, and community will be in the years to come in minimizing the long-term personal effects of natural disasters, from the privilege I had of so many friends to couch surf and sublet from so I could regain some small sense of normalcy to the importance of redundancy — the ability to lean on someone skilled, like Tekendra Parmar (more on him in a moment), to keep things running at Hothouse while I put myself back together.

The good

Luckily for the lovely readers of this newsletter, I had hired Tekendra Parmar as a features editor not long before the earthquake. So, over the summer, while I tended to alternate housing and building my health back up, Tekendra effectively onboarded himself and has been working with writers to cook up some new editorial content for all of you.

I want this note to offer a little glimpse into operations over the last couple of months and thank you all for your patience.

I would also like to take this moment to more thoroughly introduce Tekendra, the name you’ve been seeing pop up in your inbox in my absence.

Tekendra and I worked together in 2021; I contributed reporting to an investigative piece for him during his tenure at Business Insider.

Tekendra is an investigative editor and reporter with a record of producing high-impact journalism. Most recently Business Insider’s Tech Features Editor, investigations commissioned by Tekendra have triggered state and federal labor investigations, class-action lawsuits against major edtech companies, and six-figure fines by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His reporting on Meta’s content moderation policy failures in Ethiopia was key evidence in a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Meta in Kenya.

Before Business Insider, Tekendra helped launch the technology publication Rest of World, where he investigated free speech issues in India. I’m excited to have Tekendra’s enthusiasm, talent, and professionalism on board!

And, in other good news, after months of short-term housing solutions, I’ve found myself safe and sound in a rent-stabilized apartment in the lively East Village. It’s so good to call somewhere home again!

With my basic hierarchy of needs met once again, Tekendra and I are ready to tackle the new year, to learn about which climate solutions are most on your mind, and eager to have your support as we ratchet things back up a notch.

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Looking forward

While the last few months feel as though they’ve slipped away from me as though in a dream, it is now early December, and, dear readers, as you are well aware, we find ourselves on the other side of a consequential Presidential election and a changing climate solutions landscape.

The administration has vowed to roll back regulations, back out of more environmental policies and international treaties, and ramp up fossil fuel drilling — all while showing contempt for transparency. The election results make our work more critical than ever.

This Giving Tuesday is a good opportunity to remind you that Hothouse is participating in NewsMatch again this year, and any donations received through December 31st will be doubled through the Institute for Nonprofit News. And yes! That includes any subscription made to Hothouse made through Substack itself. With some of your generous support, Hothouse generated $19,182 through NewsMatch last year.

While this year has been a whirlwind, I'm grateful for your continued support. Your contributions, no matter how small, make a significant difference in our ability to continue delivering quality journalism, driving climate action, and overcoming whatever challenges or setbacks, big or small, that come our way. By supporting Hothouse, you're not just supporting us; you're supporting a future where we can all thrive.

🎄🕯️🧸❄️

If you haven’t yet, take a moment to look at some of our favorite stories from this year. If you can, share them with a friend:

• A taste of Hawaii’s regenerative travel movement by yours truly and Michele Bigley.

• How to literally fight fire with fire by Colleen Hagerty.

• On preparing for the next disaster by Angely Mercado.

• Planning a climate-friendly holiday menu with Caroline Saunders.

• And some really excellent syndications exploring the climate cost of AI and offering a bit of hope in the dark.

And, as always, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Wishing you all very happy holidays,

Donate here

Cadence Bambenek

Editor-in-Chief

P.S. For the more old-school among you, you are also welcome to mail physical checks to Hothouse’s fiscal sponsor, Independent Arts & Media:

Attn: Hothouse

Independent Arts & Media

2830 20th St

San Francisco, CA 94110

Just be sure to mention Hothouse in the memo. :)

Correction: An earlier version of this article inaccurately cited Cadence Bambenek as the sole author of the Hawaii Regenerative travel series. While Bambenek contributed significant editing and reporting to the Regenerative travel series, the original writing and reporting of the Hawaii Regenerative travel series was Michele Bigley’s.

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This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Dear Reader,

It's officially winter! Happy holidays to all of you who are celebrating something this month, and I hope your Thanksgivings were as scrumptious as ours. If you think about it, Thanksgiving is a preamble to a much heavier season of eating. Christmas and Kwanzaa are staples of December. Depending on the year, Hanukkah and Diwali can fall on this month too. Buddhists celebrate Bodhi Day this month. In Mexico, you could be celebrating Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Say nothing of the secular holiday of New Year's Eve.

If you're anxious about food waste, as much as you love the festivities, you may be worried about the Tupperware stacking up in your fridge this month. But that's okay, we've got a solution for you by way of journalist and chef Caroline Saunders. Caroline trained at Le Cordon Bleu before turning to writing full-time and is passionate about sustainable eating during the holidays. In this issue of Hot House, she's going to impart some ideas on how you and I can make this next month of festive eating a whole lot more sustainable.

If you like Caroline's ideas, the best way to support her is by subscribing to Pale Blue Tart. If you liked this issue, now is the time to share us with a friend too: It's a great way of supporting Hot House — especially as we make calls for reader donations this month — and that way, you both get the climate-friendly holiday recipe Caroline has cooked up for us in the next week. That's right! This month's a double issue. — Tekendra

P.S. Enjoy what you’re reading? Click here and subscribe to support this work for the long haul!

How to Make Your Holiday Cooking More Sustainable

From leftovers to sustainable portioning, here’s how to make sustainable feasts this holiday season.

By Caroline Saunders

In the darkened house of an unsuspecting Who family on Christmas Eve, the Grinch needs three whole sacks to make off with their feast. Into the cavernous burlap bags, he tosses some three dozen cans of food, various unmarked covered dishes, grapes, a lone banana, bottles of what look to be Who spirits, carrots, potatoes, apples, Who hash, Who pudding, more canned goods, and — most devastatingly, the narrator's tone suggests — the roast beast of indeterminate origin.

This bounty is as good a representation as any of the many holiday meals that will be cooked during the final month of the year, whether to celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, the winter solstice, or the close of another year: There's way more on the menu than can reasonably be eaten, and meat is the undisputed star of the show.

So go feasts. Holiday menus include more splurge ingredients (which has historically meant meat in its various forms). They are also deeply bound up in tradition. Because of this, some have suggested that whatever conscious-eating strictures we might attempt to follow the rest of the year — like eating with the climate in mind — should be left at the mistletoe-draped door.

But as a climate writer and recipe developer who brings climate cuisine to life, I hungrily disagree. A climate-friendly feast is well within reach this year, even if you'll be cooking for a crew that would revolt if you riffed on the rib roast. All it takes to make a climate-conscious holiday dinner is a little advance planning and, most importantly, calibrating to the sustainable cooking approach that will fly with your tribe.

Transform leftovers into delicious new dishes

Even if tradition rules your friends' or family's holiday dinner menu with an iron fist, you can give the big meal an incognito climate-friendly makeover by anointing yourself the chef de leftovers.

Food waste takes a staggering climate toll. As much as a tenth of all annual greenhouse gas emissions comes from uneaten food, which produces the super-warming gas methane when it rots in a landfill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we toss more food in the trash around the holidays than during the rest of the year. On Thanksgiving alone, a preamble to the December holidays, food waste produces 798,568 metric tons of CO₂ emissions. That's the equivalent of burning through nearly 2 million barrels of crude oil.

Enter you, a glass of wine, and an evening spent thumbing through cookbooks to find uses for dishes you think could end up partly uneaten after the big meal has drawn to a close.

Leftover honey-baked ham can be thinly sliced and fried like bacon, or finely chopped, sautéed, and added to a quiche Lorraine to feed the guests that appear to be staying put another day. Spare challah slices can make a mean, make-ahead French toast. The stems of collard greens can be julienned and added to a New Year's Day ribollita, the writer and cook Tamar Adler suggests. Extra cooked brisket can round out ramen. Sour cream leftover from latkes can make a sunny citrus cake as bright as the promise of lengthening days.

I advise seeking leftovers inspiration in advance because it kickstarts post-holiday meal planning and helps me see leftovers more lovingly. Without a vision for how to use them, I'll gaze at stacks of Tupperwares stuffed between jugs of milk and feel my soul flatline. If I plan ahead, however, I can cast potential odds and ends not as sad leavings, but as the ingredients of future meals that they rightly are.

If recipe-planning for leftovers is too much work, you could also take a food-saving shortcut: do away with the typical super-portioning, preventing wasted leftovers before they happen.

Move away from red meat

But now, if your feast itself can be fiddled with, then the real fun begins.

It starts, as it must, with the other carbon-saving entrée beside wasting less food: easing up on meat — especially red meat. Animal agriculture causes between 10 to 20 percent of all annual warming; beef and lamb are outsized contributors. They're up to 100 times and 40 times more carbon-intensive than peas, respectively. Of course, a vegan feast would have the lowest carbon footprint. But stay with me, omnivores: The incremental savings of putting lower-carbon proteins on the holiday menu are no small potatoes. Poultry meats like chicken and turkey have a fifth the carbon footprint of steak. Eggs and certain seafood, like sardines, anchovies, and farmed mollusks, are reasonable choices, too.

If a main dish switch-up would strike your crew not as heresy but as a welcome culinary adventure, consider a lower-carbon centerpiece. The change, after all, can be a chance to sample holiday dishes from around the world. In the northern provinces of Iran, a chicken dish studded with pomegranate seeds, called khoresh morgh nardooni, is prepared to celebrate the winter solstice. The red jewels of the pomegranate symbolize a red dawn and a new beginning. In Provence, oysters (one of those low-carbon mollusks) are served for Christmas. In Ethiopia, families prepare rooster doro wat, a berbere-spiced stew bobbing with halved hard-boiled eggs that celebrates the end of a 43-day fast on Ganna, the Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas. In Japan, toshikoshi soba — literally translated as "year-crossing" soba — rings in the New Year.

You could also save carbon just by buying a smaller brisket or pork loin, making meat a side and training the spotlight instead on vegetarian dishes. After all, who says that black-eyed peas and a tureen of peanut-sweet potato soup aren't the real stars of New Year's Eve? Or that the point of Christmas Eve dinner is anything other than this ombre gratin, its paper-thin layers of root vegetables, a warm-hued rainbow that lights up every plate?

Experiment with biodiversity on the dinner plate

While you're playing with new recipes to lean into the low-carbon of it all, consider also leaning into biodiversity. It helps with climate resilience. Just 12 plants and five animals account for three-quarters of the calories eaten worldwide, despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of edible plants in the world. A system as concentrated as that is fragile, and the cracks are starting to show. Major crops like wheat and rice face increasing risks of global shortages because of climate change.

Increasing biodiversity in a meal can be as easy as using Einkorn wheat flour or a dash of rye in gingerbread cookies. It could also mean making applesauce with heritage varieties; a combination of types makes for a more multidimensional flavor anyway. You could also include an Indigenous recipe on your table, since native cooking is often a tapestry of regional ingredients. Manoomin, for example, a pilaf of wild rice topped with popped rice and dried ramp leaves, is a celebratory dish for many Indigenous communities around the Great Lakes.

It’s a great time to start rethinking our holiday feasts

Any of these approaches can make your feast climate-friendly and seed habits and values that you can bring back out for holidays to come. There's no better time to build your waste-not cooking skills than when you have a day off from work and relatives in the next room to avoid. Nor is there a better time to consider what ingredients we place the most value on.

There's ceremony in slicing a leggy roast beast, to be sure, but so there is in ladling out cupfuls of forest-restoring chest-nog, or passing around a plate of oysters, their shells stuccoed in greens and grays, their brine impossibly cold and crisp.

This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Dear Reader,

This month we're publishing our 100 issue. At this milestone, Hot House's mission has never been more urgent. We're still reckoning with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene and Milton. Those living in Asheville, North Carolina, didn't think they'd have to worry about floods from Category 4 hurricanes. Meanwhile, wildfires are burning everywhere from Colorado to New Jersey and Connecticut, which recently declared a state of emergency over the rare forest fires and droughts around the tristate area.

What's unique about this moment is how wrong we were about disaster safe zones. Everywhere, we're contending with a climate reality of disasters we may not have been prepared for. At Hot House, we've been examining solutions to the climate emergency for nearly half a decade — and we don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

This issue follows in this climate solutions and preparedness vein. Climate reporter Angely Mercado offers up solutions to those living in hurricane zones. This month's Blueprint offers readers in those zones steps they can take to prepare for hurricanes, resources they can consult, and tips on building climate-resilient communities.

As always, we hope our work is a service to you and that you find issue 100 as helpful as you did issue 1. Take care of yourselves, dear reader. And hopefully someone else too. — Tekendra

P.S. Enjoy what you’re reading? Click here and subscribe to support this work for the long haul!

Ready for the Next Hurricane?

With hurricanes growing fiercer and more frequent, knowing how to get ready could make all the difference.

By Angely Mercado

Several storms have left multiple states in disarray. Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida at the end of September, destroying homes and flooding entire communities. Hurricane Milton followed in early October with more flooding and property damage up the East Coast. 

A forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned us of an above-average hurricane season. NOAA credited “human-caused climate change” for the warmer-than-average ocean temperatures that increasingly fuel storms and increase the rate of sea level rise. The season was quiet for a bit, and then exploded in late September and into October. And though the season usually slows down going into the end of November. A recent report from The Washington Post stated that since records began in 1850, a major hurricane has not made landfall in the U.S. That doesn’t mean that a smaller hurricane or tropical storm can’t form and hit landfall before the end of next month. 

Jennifer Horney, a University of Delaware professor, who focuses on the public health impacts of extreme weather disasters, says the impacts of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina are a good example of why even areas that were once considered less disaster prone should start planning ahead. 

“People had relocated to western North Carolina thinking that it was a climate refugee from areas like Florida and California,” she said. “I think there's a little bit of complacency when we think that we're not at risk.”

Horney’s advice for facing down a world with stronger and more frequent storms is to learn and to constantly stay updated.

First, learn about hurricane response and risk in your area

• FEMA’S search tools help you learn your flood risk. If you're worried about flooding in your area and aren’t sure about how to start planning, FEMA has a search tool that allows you to check the likelihood of flooding in your area and areas adjacent to where you live.  

• Gather some supplies. If you aren’t sure about what to have in your home, the government website Ready.gov has a simple outline to follow for making a supply kit. Horney suggests that households gather enough supplies to last them at least 72 hours. This includes food, water, medicines, or anything a person or pet in the household may require. 

• Protect your stuff. If you own your home or a property, call your homeowner’s insurance and make sure you understand what your coverage protects and can help you replace. If you are a renter, consider looking up renter’s insurance to protect personal items that could be costly to repair or replace. Renter’s insurance may not explicitly cover “hurricane” damage, but hazards related to the extreme weather like water damage or wind-related damage. Beyond insurance, move your important documents to a safe place, put them in a waterproof folder or small safe to minimize the chance of them being damaged. 

Prepare for the incoming hurricane

• Find multiple ways to stay informed. Finding different ways to stay informed on the handful of days leading up to a storm forming is imperative to better planning. The Red Cross has an emergency planning app that includes alerts and ideas for planning. Horney says that she personally checks the National Hurricane Center’s website for regular updates. 

• Follow local emergency services online. Horney suggests looking up official Facebook, X, or Instagram accounts for local emergency responders. This could include a local precinct, a county-wide emergency response agency, local officials, and local fire departments. Having information about local shelters, updates on evacuation plans, and other suggestions from official sources can help shape your shelter in place or evacuation plans as a hurricane gets closer to your area. 

• Get backup communication. At some point during an especially bad storm, your phone service may become unreliable. You may lose power, which means you’ll lose your access to Wi-Fi. If you’re in an area that’s likely to experience outages, get a hand crank or a battery powered radio in order to stay informed about local conditions. 

• Know your zone. Do you know if you’re in an evacuation zone? Double check your local news reports about what neighborhoods/areas should consider evacuation as a storm comes closer. Some city or state websites also offer maps to highlight which areas should evacuate before a storm. For example, here’s NYC’s emergency management webpage for coastal flooding and hurricanes. 

Bonus: Think about next year’s hurricane season. 

• Learn about upcoming hurricanes before they show up on a map. Once the next hurricane season starts in early June, check on updates from the National Weather Service’s website. Further down on the home page, there’s an “active alerts” section that lists weather conditions, including hurricanes. Towards the top left of the homepage, there’s a search bar where you can plug in your zip code or city for local forecasts. 

• Take note of what made you nervous this year. If you were worried about buying last minute supplies, consider planning ahead of time instead of scrambling to buy things in the last two days or so before a hurricane is expected to make landfall near you. Buy supplies like batteries or portable phone and laptop chargers throughout the year as electronic deals come up. 

• Build a community of resilience. Compare notes on preparedness with your neighbors and extended family who also happen to live in hurricane-prone regions of the U.S. Someone with more experience dealing with tropical storms may have some useful tips for riding out a storm. Having a trusted community that you can compare ideas with is also useful for future evacuation plans. 

This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

With the news of the devastation that Hurricane Helene has wrought on the lower quadrant of the eastern seaboard, we’re thinking of our readers in the disaster area and hoping for your safety.

As the east coast reckons with a Category 4 hurricane, wildfire season is starting out west.

Kentucky’s forest fire season begins on October 1st. In Wyoming, Big Horn Mountain residents have been given evacuation orders from Elk Fire, which was first reported on Friday. In Greece, 27 forest fires erupted over a 24 hour period this weekend. That’s more than one fire an hour.

I apologize for starting this newsletter with a grim catalogue of natural disaster. If anything, perhaps it is a reminder of how nowhere is immune from the realities of climate disasters. This edition of Hot House is actually about disaster preparedness. It follows in a tradition journalist Colleen Hagerty kicked off for us last year writing guides on community disaster preparedness. It’s well-worth reading the original guide.

But for this edition of Hot House, Colleen wrote about the practice of controlled or prescribed burns, which can help protect communities from wildfires. I’ll let Colleen tell you more about it in her Blueprint. But also check out her original feature on prescribed burns here. If you’re in an area impacted by wildfires, we hope this guide is useful. If you have a loved one in an impacted area, send this to them.

Stay safe, dear reader. Take care of yourselves. And hopefully someone else too. — Tekendra

P.S. Enjoy what you’re reading? Click here and subscribe to support this work for the long haul!

Blueprint: Protecting Communities Through Fire

Prescribed burns, inspired by Indigenous practices, are essential for reducing wildfire risks. Learn how you can participate in fire management in your area.

By Colleen Hagerty

In our Prescribed Fires issue, we explored how intentional ignitions help reduce the severity and impact of wildfires across the United States. These controlled burns draw from the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities, who have long lit their own purposeful fires for spiritual and ecological aims. 

The first time I attended a prescribed fire, I felt awe accompanied with a tightness across my chest as I watched the flames catch in a wooded forest. I’d so often reported on wildfires and what went wrong in these scenarios that it was hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that this fire was burning exactly as planned.

I wrote this blueprint with that memory in mind.

Informed by insights from those who set fires and those who live in fire-prone areas, this practical guide offers a starting point for considering how fire might play a role in the ecosystem where you live. Read on for advice on staying safe, informed, and engaged with future prescribed burns.

First, familiarize yourself with the basics

• Dig into your area’s fire history. Fire has a long history on many landscapes around the world, but the role it plays differs in various ecosystems. To understand if prescribed fires might be a useful tool in your neighborhood, do a bit of research to see what sort of tribal, agricultural, and wildfire history you can find for your area. This knowledge of the past can reveal the role fires have historically played in shaping your local landscape, so you can understand how it might be beneficial in the natural spaces around your community. 

• Learn the lingo. Both firefighters and fire lighters love jargon, and you’ll likely encounter some unfamiliar lingo as you explore this space. So, a quick introduction: For starters, “prescribed fires” and “controlled burns” are often used interchangeably to refer to the practice of lighting intentional fires for ecological benefits, while “cultural burning” refers to the traditional Indigenous practice. If you want to further expand your vocabulary, CalPBA.org has a great glossary.

• Figure out who is in charge of setting fires in your area. Knowing who is in charge of the land around you is an important part of getting informed about future prescribed fires, but a fair warning — there are a lot of different players who might be involved, so this step can be tricky. The federal government, state governments, and tribal governments all have their own workforces to deploy for prescribed burns. If you see projects happening on private land, you might have a Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) in your area. These groups help private landowners organize fires through community involvement. Organizations like The Nature Conservancy might also work with local landowners to conduct burns on at-risk areas. Some universities also have their own arms that teach and practice burning. And in many cases, a coalition of various agencies, organizations, and firefighters will come together to conduct burns due to the highly bureaucratic and resource-heavy process it can entail. 

Prepare for a prescribed fire in your area

• Figure out where to get your prescribed fire news. Each of the agencies and organizations mentioned above that are involved in prescribed fires have their own approach to promoting their work, so this can be another challenging step. Still, there are a few go-to places where you’re likely to find prescribed fire announcements and updates:

  • Local media. Regional TV stations and neighborhood newspapers or blogs often get a heads-up before controlled burns and can keep you posted on when the fire is scheduled to be lit. 

  • Social media. Following official pages and users are a good option for both announcements and updates. Make sure the accounts you follow are verified and associated with agencies or organizations like the US Forest Service or your state’s fire agency. 

  • Apps. Watch Duty is a wildfire-tracking app that also posts updates about prescribed burns in select US states. The app’s map-based interface is easy to navigate and is updated around the clock. 

  • Emergency alerts and warnings. Some municipalities might give you a heads-up using these tools to tell you about a planned burn, but most importantly, emergency alerts will tell you if a prescribed fire escapes its intended zone and poses a threat to your community. Check your phone’s settings to make sure you’re opted in for emergency alerts and visit your local emergency management agency’s website (you can search by city or by county) for more information on their offerings.

• Get smoke-ready. Agencies and organizations that conduct prescribed burns create a smoke plan to safeguard surrounding areas. So, if all goes well, smoke from a prescribed burn should not impact you the same way a wildfire would. Still, it’s worth having a plan in place to deal with any increase in smoke. This fact sheet from AirNow.gov — a site you can also bookmark for checking your local air quality — offers a comprehensive list of customizable suggestions for dealing with smoke based on your living space and personal health concerns.  

Bonus: Join the fire line

• Reach out and see how you can get involved. Many PBAs and other fire-focused community groups host regular meetings, and they often are looking for new volunteers. Even if you don’t want to go through the training necessary to set a fire yourself, there are many other ways to engage. For example, you can help clear and clean up the burn site ahead of the prescribed fire or be in charge of sharing updates with the public. 

• If you’re a landowner, consider your own property’s needs. Do you have a lot of overgrowth and dead plants in your yard? Have you been evacuated due to fire concerns before? While there are a lot of factors to consider, answering “yes” to these questions could mean you’re a good candidate for having your property evaluated for a future burn. Contacting a PBA or other fire-specific organizations in your area is the best way to learn about your options. 

• Consider creating a PBA yourself. Interested in this PBA business and not seeing one in your area? Oklahoma State University has a practical guide to getting a new one started. 

This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the United States started digging 2,500 miles of tunnels under the ice sheets of Greenland, hoping to one day store as many as 600 nuclear weapons on the island that it hoped to launch against Russia in the event of a nuclear war.

Denmark, to which Greenland belongs, had no idea of the secret military operation. It had, however, given the U.S. army permission to build a research facility on the island with the purpose of studying arctic conditions. The U.S. mission at Camp Century, as the site was know, was to test various different construction techniques in arctic conditions. To this extent, they succeeded and then some: scientists at the camp pioneered the art of extracting ice cores buried thousands of feet beneath the ice sheet and built one of the world’s earliest nuclear power reactors.

In 1966, the U.S. government abandoned the camp leaving the tunnels it dug to collapse as the island warmed from the effects of climate change. But Paul Bierman, the author of the newly-published When the Ice is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future (W. W. Norton & Company; Hardcover $27.99), is obsessed with the ice cores researchers retrieved from the facility. Bierman, a geologist and professor at the University of Vermont, examined these cores decades after the U.S. army left Greenland, and discovered fossils from a warmer, boreal Greenland about 400,000 years old. In other words, Greenland’s ice had vanished before, and for those who’ll listen, that vanishing has a warning about our current climate crisis.

In this interview, journalist Caroline Haskins speaks with Bierman about his book and the insights Greenland's scientific discoveries offer for tackling climate change in the future.

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What a top-secret military site in Greenland tells us about the future of climate change

A new book uncovers the climate warnings hidden in ice cores from a U.S. army base in Greenland.

By Caroline Haskins

CH: Why did you approach this book as a history as opposed to a popular science book about how ice core science works?

PB: I would call it an environmental history, and there's two ways to approach that. One is the way I'm trained as a geoscientist, which inevitably is a mix of history and process. The other is that I didn't want to write another ‘here's climate here's climate change, here's how to understand the tools’ book. I wasn't specifically writing this book to scientists. I was really writing this book to the broader public, and that's where the idea of solutions will come.

CH: I had no idea how crucial a role Greenland had as a weather station and a plane runway during World War Two. Was there a story or fact in your research that was particularly surprising? 

PB: I’ve studied glaciers and ice sheets since 1981. I've done science in Greenland. But only through doing the research for this book do I realize the depth of involvement of both the military and the scientific community in the 50s and 60s. 

In terms of the most surprising thing, I found [it was] how early people were worried about climate change. You get into the 1950s, and it's not just in the technical literature, it's in the newspapers. It's stunning how early they were worried about changing the climate.

CH: You mentioned various figures who either were lost in history or never written into history in the first place. Was there anyone who really stood out or connected with you?

PB:There are so many. I'll link two of them together.

The first one is Henri Bader, who is a Swiss man, a geologist by training. Very soon after the Army hires him to understand snow and ice, they put him in charge of this lab that's studying how snow and ice and permafrost behave. He has all these obscure papers and technical reports. You read them, and you go, ‘That’s what we're doing today.’ He wrote this in the 50s. 

But the way he conducted himself was as or more important. He hired a woman in the 1950s by the name of Lucybelle Bledsoe, and she became a technical editor. She had a master's degree in English, and then she picked up doing scientific editing. She was responsible for the technical editing on pretty much every paper about Greenland from the mid 50s to 1966, when she died in a house fire.

What was stunning about Bader and Bledsoe and their interactions is that she was a lesbian in the 50s in the middle of the Lavender Scare, when even people like Dwight Eisenhower were worried about hiring homosexuals. Yet, Bader didn't just hire her, but hired a number of other gay women. When you start looking at the photo-archive hired a lot of Black men as engineers. 

[Bader’s] very first [mentee] was a fellow named Gerry Wasserburg. He went on to date moonrocks, and is the most famous geologist out there. Wasserberg was Jewish. So in the 50s, he was supporting Black Engineers and scientists, homosexuals and Jews, all of whom were discriminated against. 

CH: Arguably, the climax of the book is when you discover the ancient fossils in the ice cores that were sitting in a storage facility unexamined for decades. What was that like?

PB: It was the middle of summer. I was completely exhausted. I had just taught high school students for five days. I had a plane ticket to go to Cuba two days later. So I was cooked. 

The first day, [the ice core shipment] came in. I was just staring inside one of these bins. Then all of a sudden, something snapped. I'm like, wait, there’s stuff floating around in here. There shouldn't be stuff floating around. This is from the bottom of the glacier. 

I looked over at [researchers] Drew and Leah and said, ‘I think there are fossils in here.’ They looked at me like, ‘You are completely and utterly out of your mind.’

I handed it to Drew and I said, put this under the microscope. There's about 10 seconds of dead silence, maybe 20. Then he looks up with this string of what I've always described as happy expletives. He's like, ‘You are right – there are leaves and there are twigs and there are bits of moss in here.’ 

We were literally just babbling at each other, and looking in the other bins, and realizing that every one of these bins had things floating in it. 

The next thing we did was we called in the high school kids and said, ‘You guys see this? We have fossils from below the Greenland ice sheet.’ The kids are like, ‘Okay, that's cool, but you guys are a little crazy.’

CH: I was struck by when you talked about melting ice sheets, and you included a quote comparing that to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, as a gradual loss of knowledge. When you think about exciting research that could come out of future ice core research, are there any scientific questions that come to mind?

PB: The idea that ice cores were a book that could be read — I would now supplement with, I think the next great book to read is what's underneath the ice. We've only read a couple pages of that so far. 

If we had another 5, 6, 7 sections or chapters of that book, we'd understand a whole lot more of the last couple million years, especially the warm times when the ice was gone. It's those warm times that we care about right now, because that's where we're headed. 

CH: You mentioned that the scientists who developed the technology to extract and study ice cores didn't think that it would be possible until they did it. You compare that to the technology that would remove carbon from the atmosphere. Could you expand on that? 

PB: I don't think we can depend on carbon removal from the atmosphere. We need to start with decarbonizing our current economies. I am really hopeful about that. If you look at the cost graphics, coal is crashing, and wind and solar are taking off. 

At the same time, we're trying to come up with novel technologies that will capture carbon and store it, and that is a very poorly developed field right now. There are experimental plans. None of that technology is mature right now. But the time scale to do some of these pretty amazing pieces of technology has been the order of a decade or two, which is why I still come away with faith. 

CH: We have pretty profound political difficulties and the US both in terms of acknowledging climate change and funding climate change research. Where do you see the path forward? 

PB: If you get down to the level of citizens, a bunch of those differences are illusions. They are cudgel welded by the wielded by the people in power. 

You go to Florida, the hurricane damage is extreme. The governor of Florida is very far to the right, and doesn't even want the words climate change mentioned. But at a local level, people are affected by these rapid intensification of storms, wetter, longer lasting hurricanes and higher winds.

At some point, I just have to hope our national politics cools down. There really are examples in American history, not that far back, where there wasn't this division over a major environmental issue. I would love to know how we get back to that again. 

CH: I was wondering if reading that history about the Army’s nuclear power plant at Camp Century influenced the way that you think about nuclear power at all?

PB:  It was an amazing piece of technology, designed and built in about two years, and it mostly worked. That reactor was a mess, and was buried somewhere in Idaho right now because it was so radioactive. There's probably some radioactivity, probably not a lot left, up in the ice sheet from it. 

That said, nuclear power absolutely has a place in our future. Right now, we want to reduce carbon, or carbon footprint. It is baseload power. We’ve got to get away from these monstrous, incredibly expensive power plants that we have built, and think more flexibly and think differently. I don't know if nuclear power will come back, but to me, it seems really foolish if we have working nuclear power plants that we can run safely with engineering controls.

CH: What role do you think that economic degrowth has in that conversation about rapidly decarbonizing our economy, to slow the rate of warming?

PB: Infinite growth is impossible. I can say, as a geoscientist, the Earth is only so big. We only have so many resources. So this idea that our world economies have to keep growing is, to me, a complete fallacy. 

So why don't we focus on not growing, but doing better in our lives? Do we need huge cars? Do we need huge houses? Do we need to have people living in extremely cold and extremely warm zones where they have to condition the environment all the time? 

CH: You note that we have to start planning our infrastructure around anticipated effects of climate change. Are there any specific cities or projects that you see as forward-looking?

PB: There's great proposals for the margins of Manhattan, which would also be raised a little bit so there's less flooding. Most of it is band aids at this point, seeing pictures of houses in New Orleans being raised up on stilts. 

We have to think about what's going to happen if we indeed get a meter of sea level by 2100, which is totally plausible. If you melt the bulk of the Greenland ice sheet, which would take centuries to a thousand plus years, you will see sea level rise of 20 to 25 feet. 

We worry about migration now in the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. What if migration, all of a sudden is 400 million or 500 million people? That's really, truly frightening, and we are not planning for that right now. 

CH: Is there a thing that you hope people take away from your book?

PB: I hope they realize the global interconnectedness of all the places in which we live. 

I also hope they realize that not everything the military did was awful. I'm not a militaristic person, but I am so impressed with what as an organization. There were some amazing people working with far fewer tools than we have right now. I learned a lot of respect for my holders and predecessors, and I hope people will take some of that away from the book.

Then just the sheer wonder of it all. The wonder of people crossing an ice sheet on foot, and then sleeping in an ice sheet. Imagine what it would have been like building a nuclear reactor, in the middle of an ice sheet, and making it run. The sheer wonder of looking at a brown handful of dirt, and finding fossils that tell you about an ecosystem that existed 400,000 years ago. 

This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

California is experimenting with burning parts of its forest down

These ‘prescribed burns’ may reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires by as much as 60%

By Colleen Hagerty

The thick carpet of dry brush underfoot caught fire quickly. The color changed from brown to a fierce orange before the wind swept the flames onward, leaving only blackened scraps behind. Smoke billowed up, warming the cool November morning air and blurring the view of the surrounding mountains. Soon, the fire would flow downslope, consuming acres of the Sedgwick Reserve, a sprawling conservation and research facility in central California. And that was the goal.

“Fire on the ground!” Sarah Gibson, a local firefighter overseeing the burn, declared triumphantly. This first ignition was set as a test to ensure the fire caught and burned as expected — eagerly, but not too hot and fast. Now, the yellow-gear-clad crew had the go ahead to light up additional acres. 

This was a hands-on lesson in conducting an intentionally set fire, known interchangeably as a “controlled burn” or “prescribed fire.” Research has shown that the regular application of low-intensity flames helps clear built-up plant material, reduces competition for resources among the surviving flora, destroys invasive insect colonies, and introduces new minerals into the soil, among other benefits. All of these actions can help mitigate future fires from becoming the sort of high-intensity conflagrations seen in California and across the West in recent years. 

The participants joining me in the field included a mix of firefighters, Indigenous fire practitioners (skilled in fighting and lighting fires), researchers, and community members who had signed up to be part of a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange, or TREX. The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Forest Service developed the TREX model more than a decade ago to cultivate an informed workforce to tackle this challenging — but increasingly essential — practice. The Forest Service has estimated that it can take up to a decade, if not longer, to master the prescribed fire skill set, particularly for tackling larger or more complex burns. 

TREX workshops teach everything from how to plan a safe and successful burn to the part I joined to observe: how to set fire to land to make it healthier and more resilient.

The Original Architect of the Wildlands

Fire is one of the original architects of wildlands in the United States. In ancient forests, this originated from lightning strikes, which began blazes when they cracked through dry landscapes. Indigenous tribes saw how these fires breathed new life into forests and began setting their own ignitions for ecological and spiritual purposes. Before colonization, hundreds of tribes developed their own burning practices. For example, along the same stretch of the Santa Ynez Valley where the Sedgwick Reserve is located today, the Chumash people found that two of the plants they used in their diet — chia sage and red maids — thrived with regular treatments of low-intensity fire. 

Over time, landscapes adapted to this application of fire. But this practice was largely erased from the land when European settlers arrived, with tribes displaced and implementation of policies prohibiting cultural burns. Anti-fire sentiment intensified further following the Great Fire of 1910, which burned through three million acres from Washington State to Northeastern Montana in just two days, killing dozens of people. With fire now viewed as a threat to burgeoning communities instead of as an asset to forest health, the U.S. Forest Service set an anti-fire precedent from the top-down. This culminated in the 1935 “10 A.M. policy,” which called for all wildfires to be contained — meaning firefighters should try to stop their uncontrolled spread — by 10 AM the day after they were first reported.  

By the 1960s, researchers were already calling for the reintroduction of fire in certain ecosystems, but it would take decades and serious concerns about the health of the forest for these policies to shift in favor of not just fighting but also cultivating fire.

States in the Southeast led the charge in welcoming fire back on the landscape in the mid-20th century. Ranchers largely led the push to embrace prescribed burning, following practices their ancestors had learned from Indigenous tribes. Between 1998 and 2018, 70% of prescribed burns in the country occurred in the Southeast and were set by non-federal crews, such as state practitioners and private landowners.  

Meanwhile, the rest of the U.S. is playing catch-up, as there is now a broad consensus that trying to eliminate all fire from the land was a mistake. Putting out less-extreme fires today, “ensures that remaining wildfires burn under more extreme conditions,” researchers at the University of Montana and the U.S. Forest Service wrote in the journal Nature this past March. It’s the “fire suppression paradox,” a phenomenon fire experts have been warning about since the 1990s. 

Addressing this paradox means lighting more purposeful fires through both cultural burns and prescribed fires. One recent study from Stanford University found that low-intensity fires — like those cultivated in prescribed burns — reduced the risk of catastrophic fire in some California forests by 60% for at least six years. Federal and state agencies alike have called for a dramatic increase in prescribed burns, but translating those policy priorities into actual ignitions has proved to be a daunting task. Burns like the one I observed at the Sedgwick Reserve often take months, if not years, to plan. And even then, the best-laid plans are up against a changing climate that has skewed the baseline conditions and the stakes of setting fires. 

The Checklist 

It took a multidisciplinary team to make the Sedgwick Reserve burn happen. Some came from The Nature Conservancy and others from the reserve itself, which is owned by the University of California and has a research hub that joined in on the preparations. Members of the local fire department and a handful of retired firefighters rounded out the group. In the weeks ahead of the TREX, the group assembled in blurry squares on regular Zoom calls, sharing updates, emails, and Google doc drafts to plan out the week’s curriculum. 

The rest of the preparations were a mix of fieldwork and paperwork — organizers engaged in site visits and permit processes; they rented gear and made sure a fire truck and water tanker and helicopter were available on standby. As the event drew closer, they turned their attention to the forecast. Initially, the plan was to begin burning on Thursday, November 16, but a rainy forecast threw the schedule into flux. They decided to burn that Monday instead, a day that promised brighter skies. Plus, this way, the rain could work to their advantage, providing an extra layer of moisture to ensure all embers were sufficiently doused following the fire. 

This sort of last-minute shuffle was familiar to the seasoned firefighters and fire lighters. Conducting a prescribed fire requires achieving a sort of Goldilocks window: you want it hot, but not too hot; not too dry, but the rain can’t be coming down, either. Plus, there’s the wind to consider, from its strength to its direction — you need to consider where it might spread the fire and the smoke.

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The morning of the burn, there were still more logistics to go over. Checklist in hand, Sarah Gibson oversaw the scene. Gibson was working toward a Burn Boss certification, which would give her the authority to plan and manage controlled burns on state- and privately-owned lands in California. It’s a program the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) began offering in 2021 to train up its own workforce in this space. As of August 2023, California had awarded the certification to just 24 people.

“Have all permits and clearances been obtained? Yes. Have all required notifications been made? Yes. Have all pre-burn considerations and work identified and completed? Yes,” Gibson began, ticking through a list that called for considering the forecast, any amendments to the pre-written burn plan, smoke specifications, and whether there were adequate suppression resources available in case the fire starts to spread.

In an analysis of the barriers to implementing more prescribed fire, research group Headwaters Economics found the permitting process to be one of the most significant roadblocks. According to the group’s 2023 report, many prescribed fires languish under bureaucratic gridlock. But the abundance of caution is for a good reason — while it is rare for a prescribed fire to become a wildfire, it can be devastating when it does happen. In 2022, a Forest Service prescribed burn escaped in New Mexico, meaning it began to burn uncontrolled beyond its planned perimeter. That fire merged with another prescribed fire that had been insufficiently extinguished and reignited. The combined blaze became the most damaging and destructive wildfire in the state’s history. 

The Forest Service instituted a prescribed burn “pause” that year to consider what, exactly, went wrong, and whether it was something that spoke to a broader issue within the agency’s approach to prescribed fire. In the resulting review, the Forest Service acknowledged that the conditions the day of the escaped burn had been dangerous and that they should have looked more holistically at how drought had dried the soil in the region and primed the forests to burn. 

“We have decades of experience using prescribed fire. However, what we learned most during this review is that we cannot overly rely on past success,” U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore wrote later that year. “We must continuously learn and adapt to changing conditions so we can be at our best to protect communities and care for the lands and natural resources we manage on behalf of the public.”

Those changing conditions were due in large part to the changing climate. One study led by climate scientist Daniel Swain found burn windows, meaning those days with the elusive Goldilocks conditions required for lighting low-intensity fires, have tightened by more than 20 days a year since the 1980s due to climate change’s impact on conditions. And as these ideal burning days are lost, the number of wildfire-risk days are on the rise.

The Prescribed Fire

Researchers with the Sedgwick Reserve estimate that the TREX burn was the first fire to graze the site in at least 75 years. This meant there was a build-up of vegetation for the fire to feed on, much of it dried brittle following years of historic drought conditions. The TREX trainees crunched across their assigned acres, stopping at times to carefully dip their drip torches towards the ground. The fuel-filled devices, which look a bit like watering cans with extra-long and skinny necks, unleashed steady streams of flames onto the ground.

As the operation continued, I was escorted further from the fire to stand with the other observers who did not have firefighting credentials — mostly researchers, some of whom had left measurement tools in the grasses and up in oak trees. 

When one of the trees caught fire, resulting in a loud crackle as the flames reached the leafy branches, some of the researchers’ gasped; one murmured a drawn-out, “wow,” entranced by the spiking flames and the dataset it was creating.

But for the firefighters, this sort of fire behavior called for caution. The winds had picked up, egging on the flames and carrying some of the embers outside of the pre-designated burn area. Some of them caught outside the planned burning perimeter, creating their own ignitions known as spot fires. This was what the crew called a “slopover.” Kelly Martin, a retired wildland firefighter, explained to me that the difference between this and an escape is that the flames had not spread beyond their control. They were close by, not moving particularly quickly, and were still manageable with the resources the team had at hand. 

The constant hum of radio chatter picked up as the contingency plans were moved into action. The crew stopped adding fuel to the fire. A bulldozer cut thick lines out of the ground, forming trenches to stop the fire’s forward motion. Then, there was the whir of a helicopter overhead, which circled the scene before making a dramatic drop of water. 

The fire — slopover included — was out by noon. All of that careful planning had paid off. 

The Wildfire 

The Sedgwick Reserve is 5,896 acres. The prescribed fire burned through about 24 of them. 

In the months since, researchers have carefully monitored that small sect of land for the fire’s still-unfolding effects — the start of an observation process that will last years. 

Much of the area remains blackened and has yet to re-spout. Almost none of the native plants known to follow fires have appeared. The majority of oak trees in the burned area survived, but about five percent did not, with more showing signs of significant scorching. These reactions, researchers hypothesize, are likely due to the higher intensity at which the fire ended up burning, as well as that decades-long deficit of fire in the area.

But there’s also new fire data to consider now. 

On July 5, 2024, a fire sparked about 15 miles northeast of the Reserve — how exactly it started is still under investigation. The Lake Fire, as Cal Fire called it, bloomed in the summer heat, burning across more than 38,000 acres of backcountry in Santa Barbara County. More than 2,000 people were given evacuation orders as it eluded firefighters’ efforts to bring it under control. The Sedgwick Reserve staff were among the evacuees. 

The staff spent multiple days prepping the reserve for the Lake Fire’s potential entrance. They showed fire crews where the water hookups were located, where their research infrastructure was located, and how to navigate the winding dirt roads and trails. Then, on July 9th, they left as the fire made its way closer. 

They returned to a very different landscape. 

About 3,000 acres across the northern, central, and eastern stretches of the reserve burned. Some of those areas were set ablaze by firefighters to clear it of debris that could further fuel the wildfire, but other areas bear the scars of high-intensity wildfire flames. Nikki Evans, an outreach and communications specialist for the reserve, told me this fire did not cross paths with any previous prescribed fire activity on the property. Now, the Reserve is working to quickly assemble a research team to begin quantifying the impact of the Lake Fire in addition to their ongoing prescribed fire analysis. 

By July 20th, firefighters had the Lake Fire 90% contained, meaning it is considered largely under control. Days later, the Park Fire in Northern California would quickly take the Lake Fire’s title as largest fire of the year so far — and it’s still growing as I write. 

Setting fires is an imperfect process, but it’s one that allows for a degree of control as our climate increasingly bends to the extremes. 

“There is no ‘no risk’ solution; there’s also no zero fire solution,” Swain, the climate scientist, said in a briefing at the start of this summer. “You’re either going to see these fires as prescribed burns, early in the season usually, or as uncontrolled wildfires late in the season.”

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This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Last week, Bill Gates addressed one of the biggest elephants in the room with the AI boom. Speaking to a large audience at an energy summit in London he told listeners, “let’s not go overboard.” As multiple publications have now warned, there is a huge environmental cost to operating the data centers required for AI. By some estimates, AI may account for as much as 4% of global power demands by 2030. But Gates, a techno-optomist at heart, believes the benefits of artificial intelligence will offset its carbon emissions. “The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 per cent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” he said.

The facts don’t seem to be on Bill Gates’s side: Earlier this summer, Microsoft admitted to increasing its carbon emissions, in large part due to its production of data centers for artificial intelligence. Its emissions this year were up nearly 30% from 2020. And as the United States and the EU, mandate stricter environmental and energy reporting requirements for data centers, companies like Microsoft are already looking towards the global south to build these electricity guzzling centers without similar oversight.

In this month’s issue of HotHouse, we’re partnering with a new global technology publication Compiler to bring you some excellent reporting on the hidden cost of AI by environmental journalist Brian Calvert. (Full disclosure: While I did not edit Compiler’s launch series or this essay, I am editing their next issue.) Brian’s prescient reporting, syndicated with permission, warns of a the “rapidly closing window” to consider the environmental impact of a fully-scaled AI society. It’s a must read for anybody working on the intersection of technology and climate change or is interested in the environmental consequences of the tech industry. - Tekendra Parmar

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First come the chip factories, then comes the energy suck. We’re not prepared for the environmental implications of fully scaled AI.

By Brian Calvert

Syndicated with permission from Compiler, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the people, institutions and global forces shaping our digital future.

Sam Altman desperately needs some semiconductors. He’s concerned he simply doesn’t have enough – the Taiwanese chipmaker NVIDIA currently has a 95 percent market share on these chips – and if he wants to grow his company, OpenAI, he’s going to need billions from investors to start building chips and semiconductors across a global network of fabrication plants. And he’s aiming to ensure there are enough chips to satisfy AI demand by the end of the decade.

We are in a limited window, in other words, to consider the implications of a world where artificial intelligence is fully scaled. Unfortunately, this rapidly closing window coincides with a second closing window, where humanity is racing against time to stop producing greenhouse gases before the planet becomes unlivable.

That means we have about six years to wrangle tough questions about how big AI should get. Where to start?

The environmental impact of artificial intelligence is driven by the energy consumption of its supporting infrastructure, including data centers, cloud networks, and the devices that interface AI with the real world. AI relies on two innovations: neural networks and large language models. Each has significant energy demands.

AI power draw comes from both a training phase, when the machines learn, and the inference phase, when they perform tasks. The more people use AI, the greater the power demand will be from both phases, so as it becomes more widespread, so too do the challenges.

The training of a single deep-learning model can emit as much as 284,000 kg of CO2, the equivalent to the lifetime energy consumption of five cars, according to Dr. Mark Van Rijmenam, a futurist specializing in digital disruption. The carbon emissions associated with AI are on par with those of the airline industry, he writes. And the energy consumption of AI is projected to increase by up to 300 percent by 2025.

Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, has been studying the unintended environmental consequences of digital trends for the past 10 years. He began by watchdogging bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency but has turned his attention to AI since its explosion in November 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public.

AI has him more concerned than cryptocurrency because its energy requirements are different: Where crypto-energy is constrained by its niche, AI can be plugged into almost any industry. It will continue to grow exponentially. The bigger the model—the building blocks of machine learning—the smarter the AI. “If you make a model bigger,” says de Vries, “you also need more computational resources and energy to run it.”

That means that even as hardware becomes more efficient, the gains can be overrun by the compulsion to make AI bigger. Models run through chips that are housed on servers that are racked in rows and kept in data centers in the physical world. When an AI program activates, the servers draw power, heat up, and need cooling. An estimated 40 percent of the power draw for a data center goes toward cooling. One large data center can use up to 5 million gallons of water daily. That’s a town’s worth of water (or close to 17,000 households), much of it evaporated and thus unusable even in other liquid applications. And that’s not even a super-heated AI center. We don’t have the numbers for those because the Big Tech companies running AI servers aren’t forthcoming with their numbers.

According to an International Energy Agency forecast published in January 2024, data centers, cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence consumed about 460 terawatt hours of electricity worldwide in 2022, almost 2 percent of total global electricity demand. That could more than double by 2026. More than 8,000 data centers are operating globally, a third of which are in the U.S., accounting for 4 percent of U.S. energy demands. Of course, the scale of impact isn’t evenly distributed around the globe; by 2026, the IEA estimates, fully one-third of Ireland’s electricity demand will come from data centers. In Sweden, plans are underway to build a nuclear-powered data center using small modular reactors; it should be up and running by 2030.

On the user end, the agency expects AI to increase the energy load on simple search tools like Google. Where a single Google search currently takes .3 watt-hours of electricity, a ChatGPT request takes 2.9 watt-hours. Were ChatGPT integrated into the 9 billion daily Google searches, that would amount to 10 terawatt hours of additional electricity in a year – enough to power 70,000 homes for a year.

The IEA estimates future energy demand based on forecasts of the number of AI servers estimated to be sold in coming years. NVIDIA currently dominates that market, and in 2023, it shipped 100,000 servers, which in total consume an estimated 7.3 terawatt hours annually. By 2026, based on NVIDIA’s server sales forecasts, the IEA expects the AI industry to grow exponentially, to the tune of ten times its 2023 demand.

As AI continues to develop, e-waste will also increase because hardware life cycles– such as those of server racks, computing equipment, monitors, and circuits – will shorten. A regular server at Meta, for example, has a lifespan of six years, de Vries says. The company can’t even make a prediction for the lifespan of an AI server, though.

If energy constraints don’t restrict the growth of artificial intelligence, it might be hamstrung by the people who use it. There is a lively debate among tech thinkers about whether to “democratize” AI. If artificial intelligence remains centralized with Meta, Google, OpenAI, and other Big Tech companies, the potential for abuse is off the charts.

Imagine a world where AI-enabled mechanisms are always watching us, gathering not just our data but also our images, emails, conversations – all of it. Machine learning has already been used in some courts to prosecute criminals, and it does a terrible job. In 2016, ProPublica published an investigation into the practice with a headline that says it all: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against Blacks.”

Now, think about how close the world is coming to a fascist resurgence as hard-right parties gain traction amid a backlash to the global economics of the past few decades. Put those together, and you have a nightmare.

The solution could be to get AI into more hands somehow. Currently, only Big Tech has the computing power and resources to run the learning models that teach our machines and run enough computing power to service all the uses of AI. ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users, but a democratization push would mean a wider distribution of learning models that are better “taught” so that biases can be addressed and machine intelligence isn’t in the hands of a powerful few.

But once it’s more widely distributed, the technology’s efficiencies wane. Big Tech has a better chance of tackling environmental problems by virtue of its centralization. Redistributing machines and servers – which, as mentioned, run hot and need cooling – puts much more demand on energy grids and water supplies. That means that best practices need to be developed and aligned with good policies so that if AI does decentralize, the environmental damage is mitigated.

Companies large and small can address climate change by reducing their emissions and assisting in mitigation and adaptation measures, argues Anders Nordgren of Linköping University in Sweden. This can be done through energy efficiency and avoiding fossil fuels.

“Given the potential impact of AI on society, it is vital that AI companies and governments take these ethical issues seriously,” he writes.

What can be done to accomplish the goals of mitigating AI’s climate impacts while also democratizing its use? And how soon does it need to be done? Many experts agree that two main areas ought to be a priority: transparency and efficiency. But there are a lot of unknowns to deal with. “If anybody you interview for this story tells you what’s going to happen in five years with the explosion of AI,” says Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

Wamsted has been tracking energy and utilities for decades, following a backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail that taught him the value of efficiency and the strength of experience over theory. (Even in April, he says, prepare for snow.) Right now, we are in the phase of AI where the public and policymakers don’t know what they don’t know – the Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” And the major corporations who do know some of what we don’t know aren’t sharing. AI operates in a black box, making it difficult to make effective policies.

“We need to know how much energy we’re talking about,” Wamsted says, “because you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is… We can never know unless we get some real data. And we hardly have any data right now.” So, the first step needs to be policies that push for transparency.

The second policy priority ought to center around efficiency standards, he says. “We have efficiency standards for many things, and there’s no reason we can’t have them for data servers or AI racks,” he notes. Fuel efficiency standards for vehicles pushed innovations for better miles per gallon, and the same could happen for AI. A cap on energy use for a data center, for example, would inevitably lead to energy-lean servers. “So if the increase in electricity use is really, really enormous, there will be a chipmaker or there will be a data center owner that says, ‘You know, there’s a solution here,’” Wamsted says.

Wamsted is also not convinced that AI's growth will be exponential forever. AI may be limited by the simple human factor known as NIMBY-ism. The Not-in-my-Backyard constituency can be ferocious. How many data centers—concrete boxes that offer very few employment opportunities—are too many for one neighborhood? Five? Fifteen? Fifty?

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently ran into this issue in de Vries’ home country of the Netherlands. The Dutch already host some 200 data centers, but when Meta moved to open their first one there, the public protested. Meta gave up on the idea after the Dutch senate ordered a temporary halt to construction. “We have a limited supply of renewables,” de Vries says. “We don’t want to be wasting that on a data center that doesn’t even return any jobs to the local community.”

The exponential growth of green power supplies in the US and UK has been curbed for lack of places to put more windmills and solar panels where people won’t complain. Humans enjoy their viewsheds, animals deserve their habitat, and so on. But, Wamsted says, standards that push a data center to cover its roof with solar will mitigate much of the power-demand problem. Some big tech companies have already promised to become We need to be dieting harder and not consuming more calories., and they need to be held to that. “And this is out of my league a little bit, because I’m not the tech guy, if you will,” he says, “but AI could help to solve AI’s energy problem. Right?”

In the worst-case scenario, the energy needs of AI are ignored, even as the world scrambles to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Right now, humanity has until 2050 to reach net zero on its carbon emissions if it hopes to avoid the worst climate calamities. We’re still way off track on that, by the way. We need to be dieting harder and not consuming more calories. And yet, now we are seeing billions of dollars dumped into AI from China, the U.S., and Europe, potentially accelerating the climate crisis when we ought to be pumping the brakes. If AI grows without the right focus, our goose is cooked.

But there are those who argue that AI, put to proper use, could be a boon to our climate fight. Like Sam Kozel. Kozel is a mountain guy, a snow guy, a ski guy. The kind of guy who would suffer in a warming world of drought, rain, and dwindling snowpack. He earned a master’s degree in environmental management at Western Colorado University in the Rockies and now works remotely out of South Lake Tahoe for a small company, E9 Insight, which gathers energy intelligence for renewable energy advocates.

The world of energy policy is byzantine at best, to the benefit of the major power players. Public utilities – the politically connected, lumbering behemoths of energy production – are overseen by commissions, and any change must come from outside players. In a court, the commissions are the judges, the utilities are the defendants, and anyone looking to change things is essentially a plaintiff. Those plaintiffs – for example, a small group petitioning for a utility to integrate renewables into the grid, or to stop hiking rates for EV charging—may not fully understand all the information that surrounds a utility and may not have the ability to pore over thousands or tens of thousands of pages of public documents, where solutions may be hiding in plain sight.

Instead, AI can ingest these documents, summarize their findings, and provide real intelligence that could lead to real change in the energy sector, Kozel says. “It lets you just access and harness a lot more information a lot more quickly,” he explains. Where once he would need to search a 700-page report for information, he can now teach ChatGPT what to look for. “And very quickly, in one minute or less, I can get a pretty decent and comprehensive summary of anything that touches on what I asked.”

There are other more direct applications of AI, and some very smart people working on them. At Climate Change AI, teams of researchers are searching for ways to address the climate crisis with machine learning. In a seminal paper, researchers associated with CCAI outlined potential climate applications of AI across many sectors: in energy, transportation, buildings and cities, farms and forests, carbon dioxide removal, climate prediction, societal impacts, solar geoengineering, individual action, collective decisions, education, and finance. Learned machines might reduce transportation activity or improve vehicle efficiency, optimize the heating or cooling of buildings, optimize supply chains, or monitor peatlands. They might better forecast extreme weather events, or help a consumer understand their carbon footprint. There seems to be no limit to the imagined capacity of AI.

But what are the trade-offs? Every query Sam Kozel runs consumes time and energy. And as AI is further integrated into our lives, all that time and energy multiplies. We need to figure out whether anything AI gives us can justify this. Is the juice, to borrow a phrase, worth the squeeze? And we need to know now. Because we have no time – or energy – to spare.

Hothouse is a climate action newsletter edited by Tekendra Parmar and Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

Humorist Andrew Boyd’s I Want a Better Catastrophe (New Society Publishers, $27.89) is a wry examination of our impending climate disaster. The book is a series of essays — a compilation of commentary from philosophers, activists, and scientists — on navigating climate change with hope, resilience, and a good laugh or two. 

Boyd is a lifelong activist. You may be familiar with his Climate Clock: The digital countdown perched atop Union Square’s Best Buy in New York City. Yes, that one; the one foretelling the years left until our carbon emissions exceed the limits of the Paris Agreement and guarantee disaster. (At the time of writing, we have 5 years, 51 days, and 22 hours.)

Infused with wisdom and a touch of humor, I Want a Better Catastrophe, excerpted below, is a marked contrast to the foreboding orange glow of the Climate Clock. 

Writer of The Tragic Optimist Substack, Boyd is no stranger to drawing voters’ attention to important issues via a bit of humor. In the lead up to the 2000 presidential election, Boyd’s satire group “Billionaires for Bush (Or Gore)” crashed a George W. Bush fundraiser decked out in top hats, tuxedos, and evening gowns carrying banners that read “Leave No Billionaire Behind” and “Corporations Are People Too.”

I Want a Better Catastrophe builds on that tradition. Consider it a field guide for the apocalypse, from the guy who brought you a daily reminder that the end is near.

— Tekendra Parmar

Features Editor

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Hope in the, like, *really* dark 🕯️🌌

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” 

— Raymond Williams 

“Everything’s coming together,” says 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn, “while everything’s falling apart.” Indeed it is, and we are all living on that crazy cusp. Except, most days, it’s just a whole lot more obvious how things are falling apart, and not at all obvious whether we can get things together strongly enough and soon enough to avoid the very worst of our possible futures. 

In the face of looming catastrophe — climate and otherwise — we don’t know whether to double down on hope, or give up hope completely. We’re not hopeful because things — like the facts — are pretty hopeless. But we’re not hopeless either, because, well, we love life and have a heart that still beats and some part of us will always remain an irrepressible hope machine. It’s a paradox, but that’s how we do. And so, we need a strategy; we need a way to walk our paradoxical path, a way to twin our warring selves. 

Over a decade ago, Rebecca Solnit showed us how to “hope in the dark,” but things are darker now. These days we need a way to hope in the, like, really dark. What kind of hope can still serve us? (As there are many kinds.) [Psychologist] Per Espen Stoknes distinguishes four kinds of hope: passive hope, heroic hope, stoic hope, and grounded hope. Passive hope is super positive, almost Pollyannaish. It naively trusts that technology will x things, or that since the Earth’s climate has changed before, we’ll be fine. The basic attitude here is don’t worry, be happy, because somehow it’s all going to work out. Which, though it gives you more peace of mind, leaves little reason to act. 

Heroic hope, while also hyper-optimistic, is far more action oriented. It lives by the credo, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” It takes a Yes we can! There’s no limit to human ingenuity! Just do it! attitude. Despite their striking differences, passive and heroic hope share one important quality: they both depend on results. When actual outcomes turn sour and dark (or threaten to), this kind of optimism-based hope can quickly crumble and turn into pessimism. 

“Optimism,” Stoknes says, “has — scientifically — a weak case.” We should expect any hope that depends on results to get crushed by objective reality. Especially these days. So, now what? Fortunately, we have two other kinds of hope to turn to. Stoic hope says: We can handle it. We’ve survived tough times before. Whatever happens, we can make it through, we can rebuild. (And, if worse really does come to worse, I’ll drown with my boots on.) 

Unfortunately, stoic hope, though sturdy and resilient, is not particularly proactive or strategic — and we need to be both. Enter what Stoknes calls grounded hope. This kind of hope embraces the full paradox of our predicament. It says: Yes, it’s hopeless, and I’ll give it my all anyway. This kind of hope is not dependent on outcomes, nor attached to optimism or pessimism; instead it’s grounded in “our character and our calling.” It recognizes the full difficulty of our situation yet still chooses to be hopeful. 

Grounded hope channels the pivotal insight of Vaclav Havel: “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Grounded hope offers us no guarantee that we’ll ever walk on out of the darkness, but it shows us how to walk through it [emphasis added]. Here, one simply does what is right and what is necessary — and the doing and the walking are their own reward. It recalls Tim DeChristopher’s understanding of hope as “the will to hold on to our values in the face of difficulty” (see page 97). 

Embedded in all this is a crucial distinction between optimism and hope. Although we often conflate them in everyday speech (“She’s an optimistic person.” “I’m hopeful about our chances.”), they’re not the same at all. During a celebrated interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, David Frost commented, “I always think of you as an optimist.” Tutu replied: “I’m not an optimist, I’m a prisoner of hope.” If they were people, optimism would be a very likable and somewhat overly caffeinated director of marketing; hope, a sailor caught in a storm. Optimism needs results and a rationale; hope is its own rationale. 

Prominent non-optimist Richard Heinberg, bombarded at his day job at the Post Carbon Institute by what he calls the “toxic knowledge” of our dark climate future, admits he’s “not hopeful in the way that most people mean it.” Instead he adopts an approach he dubs “strategic hope.” “No matter how bad things get,” he says, “and no matter how much worse they’re likely to get, I know there’s always something I can do to make things better.” In this way — and by playing his violin three hours every day — he’s able to keep his head and heart in the game. 

In the face of looming climate catastrophe, eco-philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore notes how we tend to polarize into one of two camps: either Blind Despair (“No matter what I do, it’s not going to make a difference”) or Blind Hope (“I’m just going to trust that somehow it’s all going to work out”). In either case, there’s no reason to do anything. Both of these positions, argues Moore, are moral abdications, and together they suggest a false dichotomy. Instead, Moore suggests that “we respond to a lack of hope” by “do[ing] what’s right because it’s right, not because you will gain from it. There is freedom in that. There is joy in that. And, ultimately, there is social change in that,” she says. 

Now, it’s one thing to provide hopeless people with a way to act ethically, and quite another thing to accept that the world is objectively unsaveable. So, which is it? Rebecca Solnit weighs in on this question in her 2004 cri de coeur Hope in the Dark. Writing during the depths of the Iraq War and the Bush Presidency, she sees darkness all around, but it’s darkness in the best sense of dark: unknown and full of possibility, a “darkness as much of the womb as the grave.” She writes beautifully (uh, doesn’t she always?) about how hope is a wild affirmation in this darkness; history an unpredictable trickster; activism a fluid, soulful, courageous project; and how revolutions are “days of Creation.” 

For her, hope and despair are not simple opposites; one is not good and the other bad. “Despair,” she says, “can also be liberating.” To illustrate, she uses the metaphor of a door and a wall: “Blind hope faces a blank wall waiting for a door in it to open. Doors might be nearby, but blind hope keeps you from locating them; in this geography despair can be fruitful, can turn you away from the wall.” “False hope,” says Solnit, “can be a Yes to deprivation, an acquiescence to a lie. Official hope can be the bullying that tells the marginalized to shut up because everything is ne or will be.” Meanwhile, “despair can lead to the location of alternatives, to the quest for doors, or to their creation.” “The great liberation movements hacked doorways into walls, or the walls came tumbling down.” 

“Hopefulness is risky,” says Solnit, “since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible.” But these days what exactly is still possible? Solnit was writing in 2004, when things were only dark. Now things are, like, really dark. Yes, Bush is gone, even Trump is gone [for now], but we’re 20 years deeper into the maw of climate chaos’s relentless timeline. Up against its implacable math, what chance does Solnit’s “Angel of Alternate History” really have? If we’re basically past the threshold where we can prevent catastrophe, what kind of hope is there? 

But Solnit’s hope is not a naive kind of hope, far from it. It is a sober, hard-earned, long-game hopefulness, profoundly grounded in the complexities and uncertainties of how change happens. For her, “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.” “The planet will heat up,” she acknowledges, “species will die out, but how many, how hot, and what survives depends on whether we act.”

As always, thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

By Michele Bigley and Cadence Bambenek

A record-breaking 10 million tourists flocked to Hawaiʻi in 2019—that’s more than seven times the Aloha State’s entire population.

But as the throngs of tourists have piled up, the archipelago’s environment and culture have both grown more fragile by the day. In 2019, 13 beaches in Hawaiʻi tested positive for 18 toxic sunscreen chemicals known to kill corals and fish. Meanwhile, a housing crisis forced many Native Hawaiians to choose between working multiple jobs and living in overcrowded homes—or relocating elsewhere entirely, to somewhere like Las Vegas or Oregon.

Hawaiʻi is a microcosm for the world’s beloved and beleaguered; from Venice to Ko Phi Phi, bucket list destinations are being loved to death. 

In 2020, Hawaiʻi, for one, took the first step to flip the script. 

The path paved

The path to the overtourism of Hawaiʻi was first paved more than a century ago. 

Passenger steamboats first arrived in Honolulu in 1902, delivering well-to-do tourists from San Francisco for weeks-long stays of beach lounging and volcano trekking. Colorized photos and a newly minted tourism promotion bureau enticed visitors to make the voyage.

By 1935, radio waves carried the magic of Hawaiʻi—think sliding steel guitars and crashing waves—into the living rooms of millions across North America and Australia. With the dual arrival of statehood and jet airliners in 1959, annual arrivals hit 250,000, then rocketed to six million by the 1980s.

But as the years have gone by, critics have argued that the tourism industry increasingly caters to outsiders at the expense of the very environment and culture that drew them in the first place.

By 2018, two-thirds of Hawaiians agreed with the sentiment “This island is being run for tourists at the expense of local people.”

A turning point

Just as negative local sentiment toward tourism began to boil over, the world was finally beginning to give proper attention to the climate crisis. 

In 2015, the United Nations formally committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals, aspiring to tackle global challenges like poverty, hunger, and the climate crisis. When the UN looked to identify models for the rest of the world to follow, with its strong global brand and its own sustainable development-inspired Aloha+ Challenge already well underway, Hawaiʻi was a natural choice. 

Hawaiʻi became a Local 2030 Hub in 2018, joining the likes of cities in Sweden, Brazil, and the UK. The pressure was on. 

But just as the Aloha State was positioned as a sustainability model, the pandemic delivered a stark reality check. 

While the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns returned the islands and ocean to repair, seeing the homecoming of many fish to Hawaiian shores and offering a reprieve to those living on land, the lockdowns also blew open the depth of Hawaiʻi’s economic dependence on tourism. During the height of the pandemic, 40 percent of Maui residents found themselves unemployed. 

Hawaiʻi was being forced to reckon with the reality that it could not sustain the sheer quantity of tourists who wanted to visit, while simultaneously being dependent on them. 

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Step One: A new roadmap  

Beyond alluring marketing, the contemporary state of tourism in Hawaiʻi is, in part, due to the state’s own historic definition of success. 

The Aloha economy survives on tourism. Contributing 24.2 percent to Hawaiʻi’s total GDP and supporting roughly 229,000 jobs, the $18 billion industry is the state’s largest source of revenue and jobs. So the tourism bureau’s longstanding message to travelers —Do the islands. Tag your location at white sandy beaches and dramatic waterfalls. Explore Hawaiʻi’s hidden reaches.—isn't surprising.

Of course people listened. 

But the state, critics argue, was measuring success in all the wrong ways: By how many tourists arrived and how much they spent. The metrics generated big dollars, but neither accounted for the real costs to the islands’ cultural and environmental heritage, or the lives of residents. 

Hawaiʻi would have to find a way to prop up the tourism industry’s significant contribution to its GDP, while also minimizing its carbon footprint across the islands. 

In 2020, the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority (HTA), the state organization tasked with overseeing the industry’s future vision and strategy, took the first step toward doing just that. Under a new Strategic Plan, the HTA traded the historic benchmarks of success for new ones: overall resident and visitor satisfaction, alongside average daily and total visitor spending. 

Old Formula 
Total Number Tourist Arrivals + Total Visitor Dollars Spent = Success 

New Formula
Total Visitor Spending + Resident & Visitor Satisfaction = Success 

HTA would lean into tailoring Hawaiʻi’s economy around hosting fewer—but more engaged—tourists, with each willing to spend just a little bit more. In this way, HTA hoped the industry could make up its share of Hawaiʻi’s GDP, but out of the pockets of fewer visitors. 

John De Fries, then-president and CEO of the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, and his team arrived at this reimagined formula after consulting with the minds behind a burgeoning concept known as regenerative travel—Bill Reed, the father of  U.S. LEED energy standards, Anna Pollock, the founder of Conscious.Travel, and the creators behind RegnerativeTravel.com. 

Five principles underpinned this new paradigm of travel in their original whitepaper: 

   
  1. Whole Systems Thinking

  2. Honoring Sense of Place

  3. Community Inclusion and Partnership

  4. Aspirational in Nature

  5. Continual Co-Evolution

A proper regenerative travel strategy, the authors asserted, takes the local history, culture, and geography of a place into consideration, as well as visitor and resident well-being. In other words, it considers all aspects of the whole.

What if, the authors asked, instead of aspiring toward infinite growth, the tourism industry was leveraged to tap into the latent potential of not just the natural resources of a destination, but the latent potential of the collective cooperation and imagination of the local people and visitors of a place, too?

Where a “sustainability” framework uses benchmarks and metrics to monitor discrete parts of a system, the authors argued a “regenerative” one would focus on optimizing the potential of a system as a whole. 

“The minute we start solving problems, we actually fragment the world,” Bill Reed says. By focusing on cultivating potential instead, he says, regenerative travel can help develop the capacity of all participants in a system—from individuals, businesses, and communities—to grow in their ability to organize and respond over time. 

In practice, this looks like enriching the local ecology of a place alongside the education, health, and economic development of the local community. The more capability for cooperation, collaboration, and knowledge exchange in an ecosystem, the more resilient the system. 

Drawing on this framework, De Fries and his team scoped out a new vision for tourism, one cementing the industry’s role to respect—and support—the flourishing of Hawaiʻi’s natural resources, culture, community, and economy.  

Step Two: A new travel itinerary  

The Hawaiʻi tourism industry had fed into the over-tourism of the islands for years, hosting extravagant press trips for travel writers in the early aughts that turned into glossy magazine articles, which trickled down to TripAdvisor top-10 lists and Instagram posts. 

What if the HTA, De Fries wondered, could use that same soft power to nudge visitors to do good, rather than contribute to decay? 

Enter the Mālama Hawai‘i campaign. Mālama is a Native Hawaiian word meaning ‘to care for’, as in ‘to care for’ the land, the sea, and future generations.

De Fries saw the potential to transform tourism into a tool to ensure Hawaiians have a vibrant home, strong community foundation, and quality of life for generations.  Implementing this brand of travel became his top priority. 

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With the rollout of Mālama, HTA stopped marketing Hawaiʻi toward a “the-more-the-merrier” crowd, and instead sought to attract more “mindful tourists”—ones willing to give back to the islands and its people during their stays. 

With Mālama, HTA designed and promoted a travel itinerary around opportunities for tourists to rebuild and repair, rather than degrade, Hawaiʻi’s ecology and culture. 

How It Works 

Tourists first encounter Mālama high above the Pacific Ocean. Educational videos in flight and pamphlets available upon arrival direct tourists to Mālama Hawai‘i, a website where 50 partner hotels offer free nights or discounted stays to guests who volunteer with participating nonprofits or community programs during their vacation.  

The majority of volunteer opportunities are outdoors and regenerative in nature. Think: putting your hands in the earth—clearing invasive species to make space for new life, tending to a community garden—or pitching in for a weekly Surfrider Foundation beach clean-up. Other opportunities are more community or culture-based, like sorting food donations. 

Yet some critics are concerned the Mālama campaign is just another brush of greenwashing—doing more to improve resident sentiment toward tourism on the islands than anything else. The campaign’s success, for instance, hinges on tourists seeking out regenerative activities for themselves, and hotels don’t have a way of tracking whether or not tourists follow through with their Mālama commitments. And, without statutory authority to enforce compliance of participating organizations, HTA lacks teeth to back Mālama up. 

Meanwhile, more than 70 partner hotels initially agreed to participate in Mālama, but more than 20 have already dropped out, giving further fuel to critics: Were the hotels only interested in an initial blitz of publicity? 

Still, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. 

Regenerative Travel Activities 

On Oahu, marine biologist Dylan Brown, executive director of the Ocean Alliance Project, trains certified scuba divers to identify sea life, spot coral and turtle diseases, and otherwise evaluate reef health. He’s using tourism and citizen science to drive open-source data collection for the Division of Aquatic Resources. After each two-hour lecture, he takes divers to survey reef diseases. “We're using tourism to fund our database and monitoring ongoing threats to coral,” Brown explained.    

Through Mālama, visitors are encouraged to partake in rich regenerative activities such as this one. It is just one of the dozens of volunteer and educational opportunities tourists are encouraged to partake in under the campaign. Other regenerative activities include invasive plant removal at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, seed collection at the Waikōloa dryland forest to help replenish dwindling populations of native plants, and wetland habitat restoration to protect endangered birds. 

While helping foster deeper and more respectful engagement with the island’s local history, culture, and ecology, providing visitors with enticing alternatives to lounging on the beach helps divert traffic away from strained tourist hotspots. 

Still, the share of activities that meaningfully address the carbon emissions required to fly tourists to the archipelago are relatively few; visitors may volunteer to plant native plants or remove invasive pickleweed at ancient fishponds like Pearl Harbor, supporting the return of carbon-sequestering oysters. 

Of course, Mālama’s aspiration of sustaining Hawaiʻi on fewer tourists should translate to a smaller carbon footprint, and while the other regenerative travel activities may not sequester carbon directly, proceeds from some, like Hawaiian Paddle Sports’ winter whale watching, do go toward conservation projects and other nature-based climate solutions. 

Getting Cultural 

A millennia ago, seafaring Polynesians followed the stars, currents, and migration patterns of birds over thousands of miles to first reach Hawaiʻi. Over time, they developed a rich agricultural tradition, cultivating hundreds of varieties of taro, sweet potatoes, and bananas from seeds brought across the vast Pacific.

This legacy continues today: local families have tended to heiau (ancient cultural sites) and taro patches for generations.

At Hāʻena State Park, a boardwalk constructed over one ancient taro field offers protection and a teaching moment. Visitors are invited to learn about Native Hawaiian culture, including the historical and continued significance of staples like taro; in 2018, this patch helped sustain residents in the weeks following an unexpected flood that left the only local road impassable.

Alongside the dilution of Native Hawaiian culture and tradition, Hawaiʻi’s tourism industry has long been critiqued for disproportionately excluding Native Hawaiians from enjoying the industry’s economic benefits. To help address these issues, other elements of HTA’s new strategy emphasize guiding tourists toward more cultural tourism experiences across the islands like this one.

By more actively promoting and fostering the islands’ art, history, nightlife, and music scenes, as well as cultivating the tourism workforce, HTA hopes to create more well-paying jobs and pathways into the tourism industry—providing residents and Native Hawaiians with lucrative opportunities that respect and elevate their history and culture. 

Behind the soft power

The Mālama campaign’s tenents of developing regenerative travel and cultural tourism back up something bigger. Like the two halves of an intertwining strand of DNA, the HTA’s new marketing strategy is the soft power backing the hard power of concrete policy changes in Hawaiʻi. To reduce congestion and strain at some popular tourist hotspots, Hawaiian counties and state agencies have begun implementing advance reservation systems, paid parking, entrance fees, and shuttle transportation options. For instance, Hāʻena State Park implemented daily visitor caps and an advanced reservation system for non-residents, and parking permitting that prioritizes access for residents. 

Hawaiʻi was one of the first states to ban plastic bags nearly a decade ago. In 2018, it became the first state to ban sunscreens known as toxic to reef life. Despite the ban, toxic sunscreens are still sold on store shelves just across the street from the beach. 

A law signed by Gov. Green last June gives local community partnerships the right to manage state parks, as is already happening at Hāʻena State Park on Kauai. Residents now get to dictate how parking lot and concession stand proceeds benefit the park and their community. 

And, in 2022, a federal initiative empowering “Indigenous communities to participate in national tourism goals and strategies” directed $1 million in funding toward Native Hawaiian organizations. Meanwhile, some state initiatives are supporting Native Hawaiian entrepreneurship and small business programs. 

Short-term rentals are already banned in the majority of Honolulu.

Other policies contending with tourism’s true cost are still brewing, but not without resistance. In January of this year, Hawaiʻi Gov. Josh Green reintroduced a measure calling to implement a “climate impact” fee for visitors. Green estimated that the $25 fee could return $68 million annually that could be applied toward “prevention measures to help us avoid [other climate] tragedies like the one last year in Maui.” A similar proposal to levy a $50 fee was shot down last year. 

The sum required to grapple with the industry’s true costs to natural resources is estimated at $360 million.

Bearing fruit 

Formally rolled out in 2021, the seeds of Mālama Hawaiʻi have begun to flower. Accounting for inflation, overall tourism spending in Hawaiʻi was up 2.5 percent from September 2019 to September 2022. Tourists also spent more on daily activities, from hotels and tours to food and activities, according to NerdWallet, and guests extended the length of their stays. But the positive trend has begun to cool in 2024, as the economy slows.

But, according to Hawaiʻi’s Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism, more than two-thirds of American and Canadian tourists at the start of 2022 participated in cultural and historical activities. That’s up from 55 percent of overall tourists in 2019.

Conclusion 

Hawaiʻi is already one of the most cost-prohibitive travel destinations in the world, and the Mālama campaign and other climate-conscious efforts will likely only make it more so as the true costs of our impacts are factored into the price of travel. 

Much of the Mālama campaign remains aspirational. For now, the campaign may label a new direction more than represent tangible changes to the industry. But, by shifting the focus from mass tourism to quality experiences that benefit visitors, residents, and the environment alike, Mālama just might be creating a space where a truly regenerative model of travel might actually be able to emerge, sketching a blueprint for others to follow.

Up Next 

In the next dispatch, we’ll take a look at the “squishy” space between the hard and soft powers of implementing regenerative travel in Hawaiʻi, from the Aloha+ Challenge to community engagement, measuring impact and staying accountable, and fledgling attempts to redraw the supply chain. 

Michele Bigley has written about regenerative travel for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Sierra, Toronto Star, and more. She is writing a book about parents facing climate angst with action. Follow her work by subscribing to her Substack. 

As always, thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

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By Michele Bigley

“Tell your travelers that whenever Hawaiians run out of the ocean, they should run, fast, into the water,” my schoolmate wrote by email. “Tiger sharks love white meat.”

It was 2006. I had just landed my first contract to write a guidebook to Kauaʻi. For several months, my notebook and I cruised down narrow waterfall-lined roads seeking out hidden hideaways and hole-in-the-wall eateries. The island resembles the tropics of your imagination: greenery hangs from road signs, plumeria scents the thick air, and rainbows arc over the clear blue Pacific. 

That’s when my grad school colleague, a native Hawaiian from Kauaʻi, responded to my email request for “insider tips” on Hawaiʻi treasures with his advice on how to feed the sharks. He proceeded to inveigh against tourism as little more than an extension of Western colonialism. Never, he instructed me, disclose any secret or sacred locations—or, really, write about his island at all.  

To him, like most everyone involved in Hawaiʻi’s travel industry, I was another Mainlander capitalizing off of the Aloha State`s tropical allure. 

His sentiment wasn’t unusual on the wonderland of Kaua​​ʻi. Many of the almost 80,000 local residents are frustrated by the crush of visitors who crowd the island each year. And for good reason. 

The more people I interviewed about tourism to the archipelago, the more I heard the same message: Don’t come.

And so I altered my first book, Explorer’s Guide: Great Destinations Kauaʻi, and evolved it into one of the early guidebooks highlighting the impact of tourists’ climate footprint on a fragile ecosystem. In my idealism, I thought telling readers to support locally-owned small businesses, to only visit off-the-beaten-path locations with a local guide, and to avoid sacred destinations altogether, would help preserve the local wonders. And yet, even back then, as best I could tell, while the Lonely Planet effect had opened the world to us all and made us into more open-minded humans, it had also infused us with the mistaken idea that every place could (and wanted to) absorb our presence. 

Though I envisioned showing people Hawaiʻi not as Disneyland or Daytona Beach, but as an ancient culture and ecosystem worth respecting, the “conscious tourist” perspective I promoted through my book didn’t take hold. Instead, overtourism exploded. Guidebooks that sold much better than mine told Instagram influencers in wide-brimmed hats to sneak onto private land for iconic snapshots, revealing the locations of secret waterfalls to their millions of followers. 

Locals argue that travelers, even those supposedly practicing “sustainable tourism,” are leaving destinations worse than when they arrive—the opposite of sustainability. Unchecked so-called “eco-tourism” has damaged fragile ecosystems with erosion, coral bleaching, trashed beaches, and overflowing landfills. Meanwhile, a housing crisis has forced many Native Hawaiians to choose between working multiple jobs and living in overcrowded homes or abandoning their ancestral lands to relocate to Las Vegas or Oregon. Residents are being forced to watch as tourists trash their sacred ancestral spaces, clog roads, and jam up beaches on the weekends—the only time many locals have off to spend with their families.

As Hawaiʻi has gone, so has the world. In some cities, more than 20 visitors arrive for every inhabitant. Barcelona, Amsterdam, Florence, Venice, Prague, Thailand’s Phi Phi Islands, Portugal, Iceland, and others have seen protests or government closures over the crush of visitors making neighborhoods unliveable, degrading nature, and displacing residents. “This isn’t tourism,” reads one protest banner in Barcelona, “it’s an invasion.” It’s also ravaging the climate: The global tourism sector is now responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gasses, almost rivaling that of agriculture.

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And it’s only projected to get worse. There are already 1 billion global tourism arrivals annually, and roughly 43 million additional international tourists are expected to join the pool each year. With more residents of middle-income countries from China to India to Brazil gaining the means to travel abroad, the resistance to the tourism status quo is likely to grow as well.    

One response to the crush of tourism has been to yank up the welcome mat. The Dutch Tourist Board has stopped promoting Amsterdam. In Prague, authorities are pushing visitors to leave for other towns. 

But, in Hawaiʻi, another kind of response is brewing: regenerative travel. And proponents want you to believe you’ll never holiday the same way again.

What is regenerative travel?

Regenerative travel is a nascent movement within the wider $9.5 trillion annual global tourism industry. 

Today, the emerging consensus is that regenerative travel should enrich the local ecology, people, and culture of a destination, rather than degrade them. It should also mitigate the climate impacts it takes to get tourists to a place.

Speaking on the future of travel, the marketing firm Wunderman Thompson wrote in 2018: “Doing less harm is no longer enough. The future of sustainability lies in regeneration: seeking to restore and replenish what we have lost.”

At its core, regenerative travel is the simple idea that tourism should leave a place better than it was before. It’s an application of the regenerative design and development theory to global travel.  

Regenerative design and development itself is an approach promoted by the influential architect Bill Reed and his company Regenesis Group asserting that best development practices should improve a place, rather than simply preserve it. 

Although not formally coined by Reed until 1995, “regenerative design” has deep roots.  

The concept is a repackaging of the stewardship methodology and principles indigenous people have used to take care of their environments for millennia. Indigenous people have and still do use what are now recognized as regenerative agriculture principles when tending to soil, ensuring that it supports crops for future harvests and future generations. 

Planting the seed: From regenerative development to regenerative travel

A year before I cruised down the waterfall-lined roads of Hawaiʻi to write my guidebook, across the Pacific Ocean, a husband and wife duo, Sandra Kahn and David Leventhal, had just closed on a plot of land—a pristine stretch of beach in Mexico. 

It was 2005. Curious about how to best shepherd this new property, Kahn set out for the Greenbuild Conference in Atlanta. It was here that she came across Bill Reed’s concept of regenerative development and design. 

Drawing on the regenerative ethos, Khan and Leventhal took the local history, culture, and geography into consideration when crafting a set of parameters for their new resort—Playa Viva. The intention was for the property to enrich not only the local ecology but the local community, too. This would look like improving the education, health, and economic development of their neighbors. 

The parameters set forth at Playa Viva would then go on to inform the ethos underpinning Leventhal’s next endeavor, Regenerative Travel, a consultancy and online network of certified and curated luxury regenerative travel destinations he co-founded in 2019. 

Alongside Amanda Ho, a founder of a travel magazine and creative agency, Leventhal worked to adapt the regenerative design principles applied to Playa Viva to educate and certify other hotel destinations, given their individual contexts. 

In 2020, the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority approached Ho and Leventhal—could they apply their regenerative travel parameters not to just another hotel or set of resorts, but to an entire tourism ecosystem? Maybe a handful of islands, or so. 

Translating the principles that made Playa Viva successful as a sole destination into something more usable for other hotels was one thing. Reimagining an entire economy and ecosystem was another. 

Can regenerative travel scale?

Around the globe, industry coalitions, local governments, and tourism industry watchdogs are in the early days of working out what exactly it means for tourists to leave a place better than they found it.

If regenerative travel is to be more than another shade of greenwashing, the nascent movement will have to coalesce around a set of standard criteria as to whether or not a tourism strategy meets muster for “regenerative” in the years to come. 

For those of us invested in decarbonizing, the challenge of implementing regenerative travel is precisely what makes it so important—and so exciting—because getting it right could have widespread implications. 

That’s why Hothouse is taking a look at regenerative travel this month because tourism touches every facet of how we live—how we eat, work, play, and connect across the globe. Some even point to tourism as an ideal space for experimenting with circular economic models. 

As we’ll see, regenerative travel is so difficult to implement because tourism itself crosscuts many industries. From airlines to hotels and resorts to national parks to local governments, any successful tourism operation requires cooperation across these many entities. But in economic and ecological terms, anything truly regenerative should close the loop, eliminate waste, and create a net positive impact. Closing the loop becomes exponentially more challenging with every stakeholder added to the equation. 

This level of systemwide cooperation will be messy and challenging, and we’ll need successful examples of it to lead the way. This is what makes understanding what is unfolding in Hawaiʻi today and shaping the conversation around regenerative travel in these early days so important—to ensure it is not another empty catchphrase or passing trend.

Coming up…

In the next dispatch, Hothouse will explore the approach Hawaiʻi is taking to regenerative travel, including who gets to set the parameters and expectations around what it looks like to rejuvenate the Aloha State, who gets to reap the benefits, and what a physical infrastructure to support regenerative travel looks like. 

Hawaiʻi is at the forefront of spearheading regenerative travel practices and is one of the only tourism destinations in the process of not just laying out regenerative travel guidelines for its tourism industry but taking a holistic approach to overhauling an entire economy. 

Regenerative travel isn’t a fully-fledged climate solution yet, but the movement shows promise. It’s up to us to help shape its trajectory. 

Stay tuned for Part Two to get an in-depth look at how this is playing out in Hawaiʻi. 

Michele Bigley has written about regenerative travel for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Sierra, Toronto Star, and more. She is writing a book about parents facing climate angst with action. Follow her work by subscribing to her Substack. 

Additional writing contributed to this piece by Cadence Bambenek and supplementary editing contributed by Peter Witzig.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Kahn’s last name upon second reference. It has since been updated.

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Happy New Year! We hope you’re ringing it in with your loved ones. 🎆

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The number of individual reader donations is a key metric when we approach funders, meaning even an additional $1, $5, or $10 can make a material difference to our work. 

And to close out 2023, here are some highlights from Hothouse this year:

• This four-part series on how to make high-speed rail a reality in the U.S. 🚆🚄

• This two-part installment on the case for collective disaster preparedness  🔨 👷

• This dispatch from SXSW on the future of energy 🔮⚡

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Wow! We are so grateful to have received such an outpouring of support. With your generosity, we’ve already raised $16,040 from donors via NewsMatch this season! 

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As always, thank you to the readers, paying subscribers, and partners who believe in our mission. We couldn’t do this work without you.

By Cadence Bambenek

Hello dear reader,

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 🎆

If you’re still looking for opportunities to put your tax-deductible dollars to work solving for neglected sources of emissions before the year ends, we’ve got you covered. 

Since 2020, the non-profit Giving Green has compiled an annual shortlist of organizations where your charitable contributions will go the farthest to advance promising climate solutions. 

Giving Green’s team of economists, led by Daniel Stein, comb through dozens of organizations to identify the most promising non-profits working to reduce emissions in areas policymakers and industry alike have overlooked. And Giving Green’s annual shortlist optimizes for those endeavors that haven’t quite yet hit critical velocity. 

As world action on climate change evolves, so does the list, reflecting where the most room for progress remains from one year to the next. For instance, with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, and the subsequent progress in climate action stateside, 2023 presented an opportunity for Giving Green to turn its attention beyond the United States.

Stein says the opportunities for making the greatest impact came into the sharpest focus when looking at areas where emissions are expected to balloon most dramatically in the future, rather than when referencing a stagnant pie chart of total CO2 emissions today. 

As a result, in a departure from years past, Giving Green’s 2023 recommendations are comprised exclusively of technological solutions, each of which takes on a distinctly international bent. 

When you look globally, Stein tells Hothouse, the forecasted consumption of many staples—from the proteins we eat to the airplanes we travel in, to our everyday energy demands—are only expected to grow exponentially. 

Short of asking developing countries to dramatically restrict their consumption of goods that much of the developed world has enjoyed abundantly for decades, Stein points out there aren’t very many high-impact options to offer developing countries equitable access to resources while still adhering to the road to sub-2C. 

“I think everything has to be done [through] the lens of massive energy demand increases in poor countries,” says Stein. “What’s scary about shipping and aviation—it’s about 6 percent [of greenhouse gas emissions] right now. Projections in the future you see almost all other industries going down… All that’s supposed to happen in aviation is demand goes up and we have no way to make it cleaner… Maybe [you could] argue we shouldn’t be flying, [but that’s] tough from equity perspectives.”

This is where Stein theorizes technological innovations will need to come in. 

Some climate activists argue that we currently have all of the technologies necessary to decarbonize our society and that our core focus should be on deploying those technologies. Stein says this overlooks crucial factors. Yes, contemporary technologies might be capable of decarbonizing the entire U.S. grid in the next decade. But, take a place like Bangladesh, Stein says, a densely populated country severely lacking in open land. It would be impossible to construct enough domestic solar and wind power to serve that country’s energy needs. This is where innovations and technological solutions come in. 

Stein understands the skepticism around tech solutions and acknowledges that not every bet might pay out. Perhaps, for instance, alternative proteins will prove a difficult sell not just ten years from now, but forty years from now, too. 

Even so, because each organization is taking such big swings at sizable and difficult-to-abate emissions, Steins argues that even if only one bet pays off, it has the potential to have an outsized impact on reducing total global emissions overall. 

This thinking parallels the approach of venture capitalists who place multiple bets on promising upstarts, hoping to see one return 10x their investment. 

It’s a long game, indeed. 

Read about Giving Green’s recommendations for 2023 below, which also offer a glimpse into emerging climate tech we should expect to grow more prominent in the years to come. s

You are of course encouraged to contribute directly to one or more of the standout organizations named below. 

As part of the shortlist criteria, the organizations that Giving Green selects must each pass a test: Could an additional $100,000 in funding be catalytic? In this way, Giving Green can direct your resources to promising climate solutions that might otherwise not make it off the ground. 

“What makes our work exciting in terms of really making a difference,” Stein told Hothouse, “is being part of a young organization’s journey to being at the point where they're sort of struggling, and they have a really great idea, but the future is a little murky, to them becoming a really legit org.”

Stretch your money even further by contributing to the Giving Green Fund, or others like it, empowering experts to direct your funds to climate organizations at the moment they’re most needed.

Finally, parting with your hard-earned dollars isn’t the only way to advance climate solutions. You could also get in touch with Giving Green to nominate climate organizations to be considered for their open-sourced longlist of opportunities to be evaluated for 2024. 

Without further ado, please enjoy: 

Giving Green’s 2023 Recommendations 

Project InnerSpace 

What is it?

Project InnerSpace is a non-profit working to accelerate geothermal energy development globally. 

Project InnerSpaces does this by collaborating with oil and gas companies knowledgeable in the kinds of drilling technologies and techniques that can be applied to access the naturally occurring heat deep below the Earth’s crust. They are working to support opportunities to derisk and accelerate the adoption of new geothermal technology. 

The latest:

This year, Project InnerSpace launched a public map assessing swaths of land for potential geothermal energy exploration. The resource, developed through a partnership with Google, was launched in beta at COP 28 in Dubai. 

The project also emphasizes identifying these opportunities in precisely the kinds of countries still coming online, where energy consumption is forecasted to grow the most. The first case study, for example, spotlights Nigeria and the Lagos metropolitan area. Project InnerSpace hopes to release maps correlating to the world’s 100 most populous cities by December 2026. 

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Opportunity Green 

What is it?

Opportunity Green is a team of lawyers, economists, and policy experts using their knowledge of our global political and judicial systems to pursue legal and industry actions to drive down emissions. To date, this has entailed a dedicated focus primarily across two industries—international shipping and commercial aviation—where demand is only expected to grow, and little in the way of solutions have yet to be pioneered. 

Opportunity Green does this by motivating policymakers and building coalitions between activists and industry to both regulate existing industry as well as support industry-specific technological innovation, such as in green aviation and marine shipping fuels. 

The latest:

On the marine shipping front, Opportunity Green leverages an international body known as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which regulates all international shipping, to push for a more climate-conscious maritime policy. 

In September of this year, Opportunity Green also released a report shedding light on the greenwashing perpetrated by the cruise industry for their deceptive promotion of liquified natural gas as a ‘transitional’ fuel, while downplaying its true impacts on climate. 

Opportunity Green is also seeking to leverage the power of consortiums—earlier this year pulling maritime shipping and aviation companies together into the Skies and Seas Hydrogen Accelerator Coalition—to advocate for policies to drive innovation in alternative fuels. 

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Good Energy Collective 

What is it?

The Good Energy Collective is a non-profit policy research organization that works with communities and policy-makers to build grassroots support for the deployment of “advanced” nuclear energy. Good Energy Collective accomplishes this via awareness campaigns and policy advocacy. Historically, little philanthropic support has gone toward nuclear power due to public skepticism and fear. 

The latest:

In 2023, Good Energy Collective was hoping to see some acceleration in advanced nuclear reactor adoption. But advanced nuclear didn’t hit the milestones this year some expected it to hit.

In a blow to proponents of nuclear, six small modular nuclear reactors planned in Utah were canceled due to inflation and the increasing cost of construction materials. 

While this setback is a disappointment, Stein reiterates that each of these technological avenues is a long game, and ups and downs are to be expected. 

In the meantime, Good Energy Collective received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to work on consent-based siting of nuclear waste and began repurposing retired coal plant sites into nuclear plants. 

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Good Food Institute

What is it?

The Good Food Institute is a non-profit engaged in supporting alternative protein innovation, betting that they can make alternative proteins competitive with conventional meat in terms of both price and taste. 

Agriculture constitutes 10 percent of global emissions, with livestock making up the lion's share. And global meat production is only projected to double by 2050, according to the United Nations. Alternative proteins would be a convenient solution. But, to date, alternative proteins have failed to convert all but the most zealous environmentally-conscious consumers. 

The latest:

To succeed in the marketplace, Stein says, the taste and quality of alternative proteins must meet or exceed that of traditional meats. Instead, Stein says the last few years saw venture capital’s appetite for alternative proteins exceed consumer demand for its contemporary quality, taste, and price. 

As a result, alternative proteins have had a setback in the public consciousness. The share price of Beyond Meat Inc. is $9.99, down from $234.90 at its peak in July 2019.  

Still, like other innovation-based climate solutions, Stein says he expects alternative proteins to mature over a long time. But there is momentum for the road ahead. In 2023, GFI was awarded millions in the U.K. and EU for research and development funding. GFI also dramatically expanded its network of universities collaborating on the research to 53, up from 36 last year. 

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Industrious Labs

What is it?

The non-profit Industrious Labs combines high-level policy, corporate campaigns, and grassroots activism to create a robust response to industry emissions. 

Heavy industry contributes nearly one-third of annual carbon emissions, yet most federal policies don’t address the four largest sources of industrial emissions: the production of steel, concrete, aluminum, and fertilizer.

Industrious Labs targets these and other industrial emissions by driving coalition-building between government actors and industry members to implement policy and raise sustainability standards.

The latest:

This year Industrious Labs highlighted the health hazards of Detroit carmakers' use of steel made from burning coal. The campaign also included motivating industry players to promote a transition to green steel, a coalition that has ballooned to 45 organizations and 130 advocates as of this fall. 

This work has successfully resulted in a temporary pause by Cleveland-Cliffs, a North American steel producer, on an investment in coal while the coalition works to permanently shift the investment to green steel. 

Further, in 2023, IL built out a robust public dashboard that monitors emissions of the thousands of unregulated industrial plants across the country, including emissions from burning wood in the paper industry to the release of nitrous acid at chemical facilities.

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Clean Air Task Force

What is it?

Established in 1996, the Clean Air Task Force is an international nonprofit focusing on driving scalable technological and policy-based solutions to the climate crisis. 

CATF’s holds the dual goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 while also doubling the global energy grid’s capacity to provide energy access to billions of people in developing countries. 

Over the last nearly three decades, CATF has played an important role in shaping policy on sources of emissions, including methane. 

“Clean Air Task Force focuses on policy to move the needle on neglected technologies that aren’t getting attention from government or industry,” says Stein. “They’ve got an exciting bunch of wins under their belt.”

The latest:

In 2023, CATF continued its campaign against methane and expanded its Superhot Rock Project Map and other supplemental resources for geothermal technology, including directing $20 million to explore superhot rock pilot demonstrations. 

CATF is also shepherding the future of hydrogen production stateside. In October of this year, the Biden Administration allocated $7 billion to seven regional hubs for hydrogen production, hubs that Clean Air Task Force anticipates will support hydrogen implementation via community engagement and other activities. 

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Hothouse is a newsletter catalyzing climate action edited by Cadence Bambenek with additional editing of this issue by Peter Guy Witzig. We rely on reader contributions, support us today:

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