This Week on Earth: Feb 18-24
A snowy dusk scene on the Northwestern Lakefill. (Ruby Grisin/ION)
Chicago
The city of Chicago is suing six oil and gas corporations and their largest trade association for deceiving Chicago consumers about the climate dangers posed by their projects. The suit was filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, and the complaint names BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute as Defendants.
In a statement from Mayor Brandon Johnson regarding the suit, Johnson said, “From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as we are the costs of surviving them.”
Impacts from the climate crisis, including dangerous summer heat, winter polar vortexes paired with extreme weather fluctuation, and increased precipitation, low income and Black, Brown and Indigenous communities across Chicago have been hit the hardest.
The lawsuit details the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to misinform Chicagoans about their role in the climate crisis, thereby delaying a city-wide transition to lower-carbon and green energy sources.
“These companies knowingly deceived Chicago consumers in their endless pursuit of profits,” said Alderman Matt Martin.
The suit seeks to have Big Oil companies pay for the damages incurred by the city and fund future adaptation projects to make the city more resilient to climate change.
United States
The Trump administration laid off 1,000 National Park Service (NPS) employees after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk, pushed an aggressive plan to slash federal spending on the parks. Job offers for thousands of seasonal workers were also rescinded.
The layoffs represent approximately five percent of the year-round staff. These workers helped to maintain clean parks, educate visitors, and handle operations. Former park service employees took to social media to share their reactions over the layoffs.
As National Parks across the country prepare for bustling tourism over the summer, both current and former Parks employees have warned that the layoffs will leave parks understaffed with longer lines, less maintained trails, closed campgrounds, and limited access to park amenities. Since 2010, the NPS saw a 20% reduction in full-time staff due to budget cuts, despite a 16 percent increase in visitors. In 2023 alone, there were 325.5 million visits to national parks.
Following outrage from the NPS and park advocates, the Department of the Interior released a memo stating that it would allow the NPS to hire up to 5,000 seasonal workers. According to NPS, however, temporary workers will not be able to make up for the expertise lost by the firing of permanent staff. The NPS typically hires about 8,000 seasonal workers for peak season, and it takes three months to onboard them.
Small parks will be most affected by the layoffs, according to John Garder, a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent group that advocates for the NPS. At Grand Teton National Park, for example, 16 out of 17 of the park’s administrative staff were terminated, leaving the administrative division without adequate staff to hire, process, or train seasonal employees or even dismissed staff.
Worldwide
New research from Princeton confirms the longstanding belief amongst Indigenous communities that the world’s wealthiest nations are “exporting extinction,” by destroying 15 times more biodiversity internationally in order to secure beef, palm oil, timber, and other commodities for the global North.
At least 13 percent of global forest loss internationally during the study period (2001-2015) was caused by the deforestation and bulldozing of global biodiversity habitats in order to meet Western demands for environmentally unsustainable commodities. Global North nations that caused the most significant destruction abroad included the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, and the U.K., according to the study published in Nature. Existing research had already documented how Central and South American countries were forced to replace forests and savannas with soybean or corn monocultures and pastures for cattle, threatening Indigenous subsistence living and existing sustainable land-use practices.
In total, about 90% of global habitat loss is caused by the conversion of forests, jungles, and other biodiverse regions into agricultural land, and livestock grazing alone is responsible for almost 40 percent of forest loss.
According to Professor David Wilcove, co-author of the study, “global trade spreads out the environmental impacts of human consumption, in this case prompting the more developed nations to get their food from poorer, more biodiverse nations in the tropics, resulting in the loss of more species.”
Shifts in the global economy that will lead to more equitable futures thus require Western consumers to reflect more on where their commodities are coming from, and what sorts of extractive policies led to easy accessibility of environmentally unsustainable products.