Open Newswire

ROCK CREEK — Punch more roads through the forest, and you’ll get more people starting fires, fewer bull trout and an even heftier maintenance bill. Keep the 2001 Roadless Rule in place, and you’ll ensure elk have a healthy habitat, and you’ll still be able to reduce wildfire risk. Those were some of the arguments […]

Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers: Question: It appears from what we hear that Montreat College is building a data center near the Veterans Park in Black Mountain near the Swannanoa River. It already appears forest land is being cleared. You’ll need to confirm, of course, but I hope Asheville […] The post Answer Man: Is Montreat College building a data center, or is that just the rumor mill? Confusing letter about voting? appeared first on Asheville Watchdog.

PADANG, Indonesia — The government of West Sumatra plans to move forward with a legal pathway for up to 300 small mines operating illegally in the heavily forested province, joining several other devolved governments grappling with how to treat the vast number of unlicensed mines operating across Indonesia. “Environmental damage brings long-term problems, therefore we […]

Pittsburgh-based Alcoa will pay the Australian government a settlement the company put at $36 million for “unlawfully” clearing tracts of endangered forest without approvals between 2019 and 2025. The metals giant began mining bauxite — the raw ingredient for aluminum — from beneath Australia’s Northern Jarrah forest in the 1960s, but its footprint has swelled […]

(The Center Square) – An Ohio legislator wants the state to spend $1 million in taxpayer dollars to study bringing back elk to the state after a nearly 100-year absence. The elk study is part of State Rep. Justin Pizzulli’s, R-Scioto County, bill that would spend $3 million in taxpayer funds, including another $2 million to study expanding side-by-side trails in the state, according to a fiscal analysis by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. While House Bill 641 would take the money from the state’s General Fund, it also encourages the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to explore private funding options. “The Division shall explore federal and private funding opportunities, such as the Pittman- Robertson Wildlife Restoration Fund,” the bill states. “The Division may collaborate with state universities, including The Ohio State University and Shawnee State University, for ecological and tourism impact research.” The bill calls for DNR to conduct a study to evaluate the feasibility of reintroducing elk into Ohio's state forests and wildlife areas. The legislation requires a study of ecological impact on the state, including potential damage to crops and vegetation as well as the impact on soil, water and other species and on the risk of diseases such as bovine tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease. It would also require an economic study to estimate “the costs to the state and potential return on investment through license sales, tourism, and related tax revenues.” The study would also include estimates on the cost of fencing and other protective measures that would be required. Elk were once common in Ohio but vanished around the mid 19th century, due to unregulated hunting, habitat loss and other factors. “The last known native eastern elk in Ohio was reportedly shot around 1840 or 1841 in Ashtabula County,” according to an article on the website, BiologyInsights.com. Pizzulli did not immediately return a request for comment on the legislation. The Ohio Division of Wildlife contracted with wildlife researchers to conduct a study on elk in 2015, spokeswoman Karina Cheung told The Center Square. “This assessment concluded at that time that it was possible for habitat to support a limited number of elk in one or more areas of southeast Ohio,” Cheung said. In 2020, Chronic Wasting Disease was found in a wild deer herd in Ohio and “has continued to spread,” Cheung said. Elk are also susceptible to the disease, she said. “Elk in other states are now testing positive for CWD,” the spokeswoman said. “If future studies regarding elk reintroduction in Ohio move forward, we would recommend that the threat of CWD be weighed as part of any recommendations.”

Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. A growing body of research suggests that in the tropics, it is also a product of ecosystems. Forests do not merely receive rain. They help generate it, regulate its distribution, and sustain the conditions that allow it […]

Nearly two-dozen bat species build their own leaf shelters across Central and South America. But deforestation is threatening these architects, along with their forest homes.

Mangroves have become a favored solution in climate and conservation circles. They absorb carbon, blunt storm surge and support fisheries. Funding has followed. Yet outcomes often lag ambition. In parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, research suggests that roughly 70% of restoration projects struggle to establish healthy forests. Seedlings die. Sites flood incorrectly. Community […]

What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology? Photo by Solomon Wada on Unsplash A week after I interviewed writer, critic, and academic Ainehi Edoro on her debut book Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, I went on a road trip from Accra to Elmina. When we drove past a sprawling green landscape, whose lushness stood out in contrast to the beige city view to its left, I was informed that the green belt was Achimota Forest, where runaway slaves hid and found refuge. It was later established as a reserve for fuelwood plantation for a nearby school. Such is the immediacy of Edoro’s book; its focus, the forest, is not only pervasive in African landscapes, but is strongly echoed in African histories. But, of course, Edoro is not speaking about real-life forests but, instead, those we find in African fiction. Forest Imaginaries argues that analyses of the forest as a stage for magic or an allegorical tool are limiting. The more expansive and effective perspective, she offers, is that of the forest as a mechanism or “experimental laboratory” for worldmaking. If we think about the fictional forest with its mysterious and imaginative qualities as a distinct category of space, then we can push our thinking beyond spaces in African fiction like the household or the nation, towards a more radical imagination. Edoro builds on four novels—although she references many more—to form the chapters of the book: Chaka by Thomas Mofolo, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. All four are wild, imaginatively unbound texts where the forest is a repository for knowledge, a reengineered utopic future, or even a juridical methodology for deciding right and wrong. While Achebe’s forest is an exclusionary mechanism that keeps “abominations” out of the village, Okorafor’s aquatic forest is a refuge where all human creatures can exist safely. Through fictional forests, we can glean insights on power dynamics, and how the author suggests we might circumvent them to build better worlds. Most significantly, the book contributes to the long-standing and necessary tradition of orienting the global form of African fiction, into something that comes from “local soil,” as Edoro puts it in our conversation. Forest Imaginaries uses indigenous storytelling and cosmology to expand what the novel—a European invention—can do. This expansion creates something new altogether; something that Edoro argues, is only visible when you cease to look at African fiction from its European genealogy. Karen Chalamilla I read somewhere that you started writing Forest Imaginaries as part of your dissertation? Ainehi Edoro Yes, the dissertation was an incubation space where I tested the idea that we could think about forests as machineries in fictional worlds. But the book is where I figured it out and got to work with richer archives. Karen Chalamilla You refer to the strategy for the analysis of the forest as machinery, as literary archeology. What is literary archeology? Ainehi Edoro Literary archeology is the idea that there are layers through fictional worlds. Typically when we think about stories, we think about settings, which are useful because they allow us to do symbolic work. We can say the city represents X, or the household represents X. But this kind of two-dimensionality can be limiting. The French theorist Michel Foucault had this idea that if you wanted to figure out how to define a large-scale concept like, say, power, you could do that by connecting many different kinds of things that sometimes do not even appear related to the term. He called this process archeology. This helped me understand why you could have the evil forest in Things Fall Apart, which appears to be one space, but as you go through the text, you realize that it is also connected to the ancestral space and the divine space. To figure out what the evil forest is, you have to think through spaces as being layered and connected. Karen Chalamilla Okorafor, whose work you build on in the last chapter of the book, labeled her work Africanfuturism in response to her books being misrepresented. In the book, you come up with a label of your own: spectacular fiction. I wonder if, like Okorafor, you had in mind the misrepresentation of African fiction when you came up with it? Ainehi Edoro By spectacular fiction, I mean a kind of otherworldly storytelling rooted in the Yorùbá idea of ìrán, which is often translated as “spectacle” or visionary appearance. In this tradition, a spectacle is a moment when an image or scene from another world enters into the world of the living, even if briefly. I use this idea to read Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard but extend it to other works like Okri’s The Famished Road, Unathi Slasha’s Jah Hills, Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine, and Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda, where storytelling is essentially the staging of visionary events. These works are often described as eccentric, and they are beautifully strange, but I also want to suggest that what we read as eccentric is the pressure of otherworldly knowledges against human experience. These novels are important because they are also asking: Are there moments of collective crisis when ordinary ways of knowing fail us? When a people confront uncertainty so disruptive that inherited habits and institutions no longer suffice? Are these the moments when societies turn to ancestral memory, to cosmology, to other domains of knowledge in order to think anew? Karen Chalamilla Can you speak a little about the forest as a space of refuge as seen in Okorafor’s aquatic forest in Lagoon, as opposed to somewhere that facilitates violence like in Things Fall Apart or somewhere you pass through like in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Ainehi Edoro The idea of the forest as refuge is something that I saw later. In Okorafor’s Lagoon, the story begins with a swordfish whose life is placed in danger by oil spills. By the end of the novel, the forest is reengineered into a space where ecological disaster has been averted and every being, whether it’s a swordfish, a plankton, a human being is protected. The type of hierarchy where humans are at the top of the food chain and so every form of life can be exposed to violence for the sake of the human has been flattened. Okorafor is not the only one doing this type of reimaging of the forest; in La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono, a queer community that is able to find refuge from a homophobic town in the forest. One of their rules is that they will be vegan and never kill animals to eat, which might seem tangential, but it makes sense with Obono trying to imagine the forest as not just a passing through space where we go to find knowledge and return, but a space where we can reimagine the world in its most radical form: as a space where life can exist on the basis of a radical openness to difference. These novels go beyond simply questioning and undermining binaries of the human and non-human, the human and the animal, and instead they argue that we have to push our thinking to the point of imagining the forest as a space where a life that is radically inclusive of all life forms can exist. In the arc that Forest Imaginaries follows, I’m happy that I ended at that point. Karen Chalamilla That radical reimagining, sounds to me, like a feminist endeavor. Ainehi Edoro It is feminist, I would say. I think in lots of the other texts that I look at, with the exception of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, there is a division of the forest versus the world. African storytelling of the forest generally posits the binary in order to break the binary. But when I’m reading Trifonia Melibea Obono’s text, when I’m reading Veroniqué Tadjo’s Reine Pokou, when I’m reading Okorafor’s Lagoon, they reinforce the idea that forests are not just transitional spaces. We have to be able to live in the forest, in spite of all its instabilities and fragmentedness. To me, there is something very feminist about saying that we are tired of simply positing binaries and breaking them. Can we just push imagination further and reimagine a world where binaries have been completely deactivated? Karen Chalamilla When I was reading the Okorafor chapter, I felt that her conception of “non-human” is very similar to Achebe’s “abomination,” but like you said, what the authors do with that binary is where the contrast comes in. Ainehi Edoro Your hunch is absolutely right, and actually, in a very earlier version of the chapter, I wanted to close the genealogy and argue that Lagoon is the sequel to Things Fall Apart. Okarafor reverses all the ways that Achebe constitutes the world around excluded life by creating a world where exclusion is literally not possible. Okonkwo excludes his son who clearly didn’t fit into the idea of manhood in that world, and his own father was excluded based on that ground as well, by being thrown into the evil forest. There are more lives and objects that have been excluded into the evil forest and left there for as long as the clan has existed. The evil forest is its own world of excluded life forms. Okorafor’s novel to me is saying: What happens when we are able to enter into the evil forest and build a world around all these life forms that have been excluded by a human-centered imaginary? It’s almost a critique of many of the binaries that Achebe takes for granted in building his own world. It expresses a love for the forest such that it is no longer this scary place that we are going in and popping out as quickly as we can. Instead, the forest is, in a sense, the future. Karen Chalamilla In what ways did your knowledge of the publishing industry feel helpful in producing this book? Ainehi Edoro I think it made me very intentional about the way that I wanted the book to be in the world, even up to the cover. I love the cover of my book. It makes me so happy anytime I look at it. The effort that I put into it, which, for an academic book, seems inconsequential, was very important. I already existed in that mainstream space where the question of how your book looks on an Instagram feed is an important one. In social media, information circulates in a very particular way, and I think that knowledge helped in the decisions for the production of the book. Also, my experience through Brittle Paper helped me at least attempt to make the book legible to a broader audience, despite it being academic, which means the language has to be a particular way. Karen Chalamilla When I was reading Forest Imaginaries, there was a lot of debate around art’s place in the world in my corner of the internet. I wonder what your thoughts are on the conversation especially as someone that engages with fiction as a world-building mechanism. Ainehi Edoro I think what fiction is able to do is becoming even more important as so many aspects of our world are played out in media environments. We need to be able to influence culture in multiple directions. You need the brick and mortar of being out on the streets, building schools, creating literary festivals. But the media war is also very real. So, we have to keep building capacity for our worlds to be able to occupy spaces of power in media landscapes. That’s why it’s so important to me that African writers do the things that they do on social media, because we need to show up for people who exist and depend on those spaces for knowledge. We cannot abdicate those spaces. Both need to happen, which creates this very layered—again, going back to the image of archeology and the forest—understanding of spaces and power. We need to keep this in mind so that we can create archives that are living, that are durable and that are useful.

“It’s well and truly the largest amount that’s been paid by way of an enforceable undertaking around the environment laws nationally,” said Murray Watt, Australia's mining minister. The post Alcoa pays Australian feds $36 million for illegal forest clearing appeared first on Pittsburgh's Public Source. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

SUMATRA, Indonesia — Armed with a machete, some sticky gum and a recording of birdsong on his phone, “Peni” makes his way into the forest. He’s searching for songbirds in the Sumatran jungle, specifically the white-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus), known locally as murai batu. The popularity of murai batu has boomed in the past decade […]

What happens when we stop reading African fiction through European literary history and instead trace its worldmaking through indigenous cosmology? Photo by Solomon Wada on Unsplash A week after I interviewed writer, critic, and academic Ainehi Edoro on her debut book Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, I went on a road trip from Accra to Elmina. When we drove past a sprawling green landscape, whose lushness stood out in contrast to the beige city view to its left, I was informed that the green belt was Achimota Forest, where runaway slaves hid and found refuge. It was later established as a reserve for fuelwood plantation for a nearby school. Such is the immediacy of Edoro’s book; its focus, the forest, is not only pervasive in African landscapes, but is strongly echoed in African histories. But, of course, Edoro is not speaking about real-life forests but, instead, those we find in African fiction. Forest Imaginaries argues that analyses of the forest as a stage for magic or an allegorical tool are limiting. The more expansive and effective perspective, she offers, is that of the forest as a mechanism or “experimental laboratory” for worldmaking. If we think about the fictional forest with its mysterious and imaginative qualities as a distinct category of space, then we can push our thinking beyond spaces in African fiction like the household or the nation, towards a more radical imagination. Edoro builds on four novels—although she references many more—to form the chapters of the book: Chaka by Thomas Mofolo, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. All four are wild, imaginatively unbound texts where the forest is a repository for knowledge, a reengineered utopic future, or even a juridical methodology for deciding right and wrong. While Achebe’s forest is an exclusionary mechanism that keeps “abominations” out of the village, Okorafor’s aquatic forest is a refuge where all human creatures can exist safely. Through fictional forests, we can glean insights on power dynamics, and how the author suggests we might circumvent them to build better worlds. Most significantly, the book contributes to the long-standing and necessary tradition of orienting the global form of African fiction, into something that comes from “local soil,” as Edoro puts it in our conversation. Forest Imaginaries uses indigenous storytelling and cosmology to expand what the novel—a European invention—can do. This expansion creates something new altogether; something that Edoro argues, is only visible when you cease to look at African fiction from its European genealogy. Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think by Ainehi Edoro (2025), is available from Columbia University Press.

(The Center Square) – Democrats and environmentalists are sounding the alarm over the recently-released farm bill, which includes deregulatory and pro-industry provisions supported by the Trump administration. The draft Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 scales back regulatory hurdles for pesticide manufacturers, restricts federal funding for certain solar “farm” projects, and gives the U.S. Department of Agriculture more control over international food assistance. Congress is under pressure to pass a farm bill, which it is supposed to do every five years but has not since 2018. Although the majority of the draft’s content is bipartisan, it has received pushback for proposed changes that critics say will reverse environmental progress and shield large corporations from public accountability. One of the most controversial measures would give the Environmental Protection Agency the sole authority to approve national pesticide labeling requirements, including any warnings about potential product risks. Additionally, pesticide manufacturers would be immune from lawsuits alleging they failed to adequately communicate potential harms linked to their product, so long as the product label fit EPA standards. The Center for Biological Diversity has called the bill a “monstrosity” that would “allow foreign-owned pesticide conglomerates to dominate the policies that impact the safety of the food every American eats.” “This Republican Farm Bill proposal is a grotesque, record-breaking giveaway to the pesticide industry that will free Big Ag to accelerate the flow of dangerous poisons into our nation's food supply and waterways," Brett Hartl, the organization’s government affairs director, told The Center Square. “This bill would block people suffering from pesticide-linked cancers from suing pesticide makers, eviscerate the EPA's ability to protect rivers and streams from direct pesticide pollution, and give the pesticide industry an unprecedented veto over extinction-preventing safeguards for our nation's most endangered wildlife,” Hartl added. Supporters argue the measure will boost the competitiveness of America’s agricultural sector, provide regulatory certainty, and shield corporations from "frivolous" lawsuits. CropLife America, which represents the nation’s pesticide industry, did not respond to The Center Square’s request for comment in time for publication. Democratic lawmakers have condemned other parts of the farm bill as well, such as a restriction on federal funding of solar projects located on forest or prime farmland. The legislation also transfers authority to administrate the Food for Peace program from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the USDA, a move Democrats and other critics say could endanger the program's efficiency and effectiveness. With partisanship running high in Congress, it is unclear if enough Democrats will support the 802-page bill, which authorizes funds for crop insurance, disaster assistance, risk management, farm loans, rural energy grants, forest management, and hundreds of other critical bipartisan initiatives. House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angi Craig, D-Minn., described the legislation as "a shell of a farm bill with poison pills that complicates if not derails chances of getting anything done." The committee will mark up the bill next week, where Democrats will likely introduce amendments to strip parts of the bill they dislike. Republicans need at least seven Senate Democrats to vote for the bill for it to reach the president’s desk.

Deforestation and land use change can accelerate the spread of zoonotic diseases — infectious illnesses that can spread from animals to humans — including malaria and COVID-19. While habitat restoration is crucial for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change, new research suggests counterintuitively that it can also temporarily increase the risk of certain zoonotic diseases […]

Brazil’s latest satellite alerts indicate that deforestation in the Amazon has continued to fall into early 2026, extending a downward trend that began after a sharp rise earlier in the decade. Data released by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) show that 1,325 square kilometers of forest clearing were detected between Aug. 1, 2025 […]

Tucked into Brazil’s Amazon forest, along the Maici River where recently contacted Pirahã people live, journalists observed a dramatic uptick in forest loss. According to data from Global Forest Watch, the Pirahã Indigenous Territory lost 3,200 hectares (7,900 acres) of tree cover in 2024, roughly the size of more than 6,000 soccer fields, representing the […]

Every monsoon, in the hills of Darjeeling, the Himalayan salamander emerges from beneath the forest floor to breed. A delicate mating ritual ensues; for nearly 90 minutes, males and females circle one another in a slow dance before eggs are attached to semi-submerged vegetation. Without these wetlands and the vegetation the next generation will not […]

A deceptively simple question underlies many global environmental policies: where, exactly, are the world’s forests? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on which map one consults—and that the differences are large enough to reshape climate targets, conservation priorities, and development spending. Researchers Sarah Castle, Peter Newton, Johan Oldekop, Kathy Baylis, and Daniel Miller […]

This article Activists are racking up wins against a false climate solution was originally published by Waging Nonviolence. Across North America and Europe, a movement is taking on the biomass industry and saving some of the world’s last intact forests. This article Activists are racking up wins against a false climate solution was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Earlier this month, a team of conservationists translocated 16 critically endangered banteng into Siem Pang Wildlife Sanctuary in northeast Cambodia in a bid to boost numbers that had dwindled to critical levels. The group of wild cattle was captured and transported from a nearby unprotected forest facing imminent conversion to farmland. The operation was the […]