Activism Stories
“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’” —Rachel Carson.
A photographer learns what it means to be an ally while on assignment on Gwich’in lands.
To save our home planet we must fall in love with it. What’s holding us back?
“This whole process of virtual public hearings during a global crisis is an injustice to my community.”
The fish’s struggle for survival is a fight not only for itself but for the health of the planet. An excerpt from Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate.
As the world grapples with the effects of the pandemic, climate activists continue to fight for our future.
With oceans getting warmer and more acidic, a group of divers are planting baby corals to restore the dying coral reefs.
Southeast Alaskans are on the front line of the fight to protect the Tongass National Forest from logging.
Jocelyn Torres of Conservation Lands Foundation on the power of grassroots lobbying and voting for public lands.
The Slickrock Trail, in Moab, Utah, is one of the most popular mountain bike rides in the world. Now, under a recent BLM decision, it could also be opening to oil and gas drilling.
She was searching for a role with a nonprofit that takes a nontraditional approach to nature conservation. She found it in her inbox.
Mustafa Santiago Ali talks with Naomi Hollard of Sunrise Movement about the power of cross-class and multiracial movements and the mandate for environmental justice.
Predawn on April 4, 2019. There’s hardly any snow in the mountains. Worst year in recent history, the locals are saying. We’re loading boxes of food onto the ferry, preparing to board the Alaska Marine Highway from Juneau to Haines. “It’s southeast Alaska, you never know,” Ryland Bell says. “It might rain for 90 days…
My family arrived in Ohio from Jamaica in the mid-1970s, during a time of environmental turmoil. The previous decade had brought to light significant issues around the treatment of land and water in the United States. The Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire in 1969 due to excessive oil coating its surface.…
“To change someone’s behavior, there must be rewards,” says Lizzy Plotkin. Her voice is earthy, grounded, easy and full of conviction. Horns honk, people talk, buses drive and a city thrives in the background, but she doesn’t sound like part of the chaos; she is instead superimposed into the scene. We’ve never met in person,…
A round of applause and a hurrah of thanks for President Donald Trump: he’s finally bringing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) the attention it deserves! Last fall, the president announced a number of administrative “rule changes” to the ESA, changes that may sound trivial, but which attack the intent and letter of the law. Trump,…
Three years ago, on December 28, 2016, President Obama used his executive power under the Antiquities Act to establish the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument. This was the first time that tribal sovereign nations allied to petition the president for a national monument designation. The Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute…
A mining company owns the mineral rights to a Colorado mountain. For 42 years, the Red Ladies have been showing up—and dressing up—to keep the mountain wild.
In Japan, it is possible to simultaneously stand both in a cultivated field and under a solar array. A group of engineers and entrepreneurs developed a model whereby solar panels can be installed on top of existing farmland and still allow the required amount of sunlight to reach the crops below. These collaborations between businesses…
Former Navy SEAL Josh Jespersen battles the destruction of wild places he served to protect.
In the Arctic, Gwich’in youth are learning that protecting land means preserving a way of life. On Alaska’s North Slope, where polar bears den and gray wolves howl, protecting the land isn’t about supporting a cause or posting on social media from a protest at city hall. Here, it’s a matter of survival. Jewels Gilbert…
In the 1980s, a group of cyclists in Washington banded together to protect their local trails from illicit activities; 30 years later, that momentum has reshaped the city and preserved a watershed.
It’s fascinating to hear Zaria Forman talk about ice, especially the way that it sounds. She describes the way it rumbles and thunders and cracks, even when you can’t see anything. It crackles and pops like breakfast cereal on high volume. “Ice crispies,” she calls it. “It’s a really beautiful sound.” Polar ice is possibly…
Snow and icy rime break from the porous black volcanic ridgeline crackling beneath my feet. Gale-force updrafts from the gullied ridges below whip the skis and splitboards strapped to our backs. Each gust forces us to step toward the cornice that hangs above the caldera to our right. The temperature drops steadily and our breath…
Hear “climate crisis” and you may picture a skinny polar bear stranded on a fragment of sea ice, bleached coral reefs, burning forests or maybe a world without bees. You’re not wrong: All those things (and more) are sadly unfolding or could be in the coming decades. Even more troubling, however, is that your mental…
Thirteen youth climate activists are taking to the courts to protect the Mississippi River and the people who depend on it for survival. Brent Murcia crosses the lively Mississippi River every day by bridge on his walk to class at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The sunset sometimes paints its gray murky waters a…
Five hundred miles off the Chilean coast, there’s a small island that carries the name of a famous castaway. It’s a stark place surrounded by thriving seas and powerful surf, and when Léa Brassy, Ramón Navarro and Kohl Christensen traveled there to ride waves, they found themselves challenged by its unruly weather and wind. But they also found that the island…
As we look back on a week of climate actions that mobilized more than 7 million people around the world, those of us who took part are asking ourselves: What next? I ask that question of myself, as a concerned citizen, as a father and as a business leader in my role at Patagonia. Between…
Dispatch from the youth-led Climate Strike, the largest ever climate protest in history.
On an incredibly clear, early autumn morning, the aging Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) van bumped along Tioga Pass Road, taking precariously tight turns at an alarming speed. Twelve of us were crammed in the back, chattering and bracing ourselves against the van’s interior walls. When the road was no longer passable for vehicles, we…
Downieville, California was once one of the richest towns in the state, but by the mid-1990s it had gone full bust—until a few local mountain bikers’ began using the local trails to breathe new life into the town, turning the former ghost town into a recreation mecca.
Thirty years ago this month, I published my first book, The End of Nature, which was also the first book for a general audience about what we then called the greenhouse effect. And my main worry was about … nature. In 1989, global warming was still a theoretical crisis—we were right at the edge of…
Everything you need to know about being a nonviolent climate activist
There’s something undeniably cute about kids protesting. They paint their signs—and faces—in primary colors, add some glitter. They smile and laugh as they huddle for selfies. Yet if they seem playful, they’re also serious. The millions of young people who’ve taken to the streets in the last year know that their generation has been dealt…
Klukwan is a village of 90 people in Southeast Alaska that’s home to the Chilkat Indian Village, a federally recognized tribe, on the banks of the Chilkat River 22 miles north of Haines, Alaska. The Chilkat have lived in the Chilkat Valley for over 2,000 years. It’s a land of natural bounty. The braided glacial…
In the last 20 years, the expansion of salmon farming in open-net pens has led to the loss of half the wild salmon population in Norway. On average, 200,000 farmed fish escape from open-net pens and many of them swim up rivers in Norway and breed with wild stocks, contributing to species decline. According to…
If you are interested in exploiting somebody else’s land, you can find convenient ratings tables that tell you the current favorites, ranked by competitive taxes, efficient permitting procedures and certainty around environmental regulations. In other words, if a country has low taxes for the rich, a no-questions-asked permit policy and a generous disregard for the…
The creation of Bears Ears National Monument was something that seemed more inevitable in the summer of 2016. It seems like now it’s one of those things where you’re on one side or the other because after all, I’m writing this book in the Trump years, and no one is getting along or in the…
In a nation known for its massive resource extraction, salmon farming is now bigger than all of Chile’s industries except copper mining.
“Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.” —William Ruckelshaus, first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency A coho salmon the size of my pinky drifts quietly in the shade. It’s hardly distinguishable from the sand below. But Marie-France Roy, a professional snowboarder who does volunteer habitat- enhancement work in her hometown…
In our 1990 summer catalog we said, “It’s up to us to make sure that children don’t go tree hungry, that they have wild places and opportunities to be in them. Once they do, they will amaze us with their caring. They need not wait to grow up to be involved; part of becoming a…
As the great Aldo Leopold once said, harmony with the land and with wildlife “is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.” Yet here we are: humankind is now the singular driving force behind the potential extinction of more than one million species, according to the…
If your idea of a great summer read is, like a day in the waves, a little escape from it all, this post may not be right for you. Maybe there’s just no escaping the severity of the climate crisis, or maybe we’re just so glad to have time to sit still with any book…
This was the rule of late summer in Montana’s Mission Valley: During the day, the landscape belonged to humans. Tractors worked the fields, and children played carefree in the yards. People swam in shady eddies and picnicked beside the creeks. At night, the bears came out. Stretching in the cooling twilight, the grizzlies left their…
Standing Up Against Industrial Fish Farming That Would Forever Alter A Unique Australian Beachbreak The day we arrived on King Island we drove out to Martha Lavinia Beach, where we stood in the dunes and watched waves running down the beach—long left-handers breaking so fast they were almost impossible to surf. However, Martha Lavinia wasn’t…
The Vjosa River flows 270 kilometers without barriers from the Pindus Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. It’s one of many rivers in the Balkans that are under threat by a tidal wave of more than 2,800 new hydropower dam projects. In March 2018, Patagonia joined grassroots groups and regional community activists in Save the Blue…
Indigenous communities across the United States are increasingly confronted with threats to their sovereignty and to the places they rely on for their culture and way of life. Nowhere is this threat felt more than in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A new short film, Welcome to Gwichyaa Zhee, looks at the Gwich’in people’s work to protect…
On March 15, spirits are high among a group of friends in Washington, D.C. Isra Hirsi, 16, Haven Coleman, 13, and other teen girls sprint to the lawn of the Capitol Building after a morning meeting at a nearby cafe. They laugh as they walk and chant, “Whose planet? Our planet!” They appear to be…
The Trump administration wants to open almost all of America’s coastline to the oil industry, putting our beaches and oceans at serious risk. Fifty years ago, an offshore rig spilled 100,000 barrels of crude oil into California’s Santa Barbara Channel, creating a 35-mile slick that fouled the wave-rich shoreline from Goleta to Ventura. It should…
Glad you asked … and if you aren’t already aware, in December 2017, President Trump issued a proclamation slashing Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, 100 miles to the west of Bears Ears, by half. In an unprecedented response, we joined a coalition of Native American and grassroots groups…
Is it possible you’re reading this on The Cleanest Line and it’s the first you’re hearing of Doug Peacock? Is that even possible? Well, if so, you’re in for a real treat. In his latest film, Grizzly Country, Ben Moon creates a portrait of Peacock—a man who’s long been willing to put life and limb…
For 34 days in December and January, the government shutdown not only impaired the livelihoods of 800,000 federal employees, it brought almost the entire federal scientific apparatus to a halt. Worse, there are indicators that the Trump administration willingly took advantage of the shutdown to expedite strategic projects in the oil and gas, mining, and…
“Forget Mars,” Yvon Chouinard said recently—although, come to think of it, he might have used a stronger f-word. Our founder was responding to a glib idea that comes up from time to time in conversations about the climate crisis—that if we exhaust the Earth as a habitat for humans, we’ll all just up and move to the…
Alexandria Villaseñor is a 13-year-old climate justice activist and one of three lead organizers, together with Isra Hirsi and Haven Coleman, of US Youth Climate Strike. She is part of a global movement of students who are striking from school to protest inaction on climate change. The global Youth Climate Strike is taking place on March…
As gorgeous as the Grand Canyon is to look upon, its greatest gifts may not be visual. “On any given evening in summer, but most notably in late June, there comes a moment just after the sun has disappeared behind the rimrock, and just before the darkness has tumbled down the walls, when the bottom…
When you lose your trout stream to climate change, where do you go to find yourself? It was late September and the creek ran clear and low out of the West Elks in southwestern Colorado. My favorite time of year: Through the V of the ravine upstream I could see the shoulders of Mount Gunnison…
In March 2018, using nothing more than a Facebook page and a rudimentary website, a 33-year-old Argentine-American biologist named Esteban Servat launched a protest that has mobilized tens of thousands of people in Argentina. Servat published a secret Argentine government study of the environmental effects of fracking in the mountainous region of Mendoza, a report…
When we move through the forest in winter, we’re often left wonderstruck by snow-shrouded trees bent and morphed from years of wear in silent solitude. Their depth of character becomes evident as we weave ourselves into their lives and ecosystems. But we often tell our stories and not theirs. Our new film Treeline follows skiers…