Owen Hartley

President Donald Trump slashed Bears Ears National Monument by 90 percent to open ancestral canyonlands to mining claims. Diné leaders and conservationists are reopening federal litigation to halt the private theft of sovereign public lands. Their fight exposes how corporate extractivism reduces living ecosystems to speculative profit.

Federal energy regulators have struck down regional rules that would have forced tech conglomerates to power their own artificial intelligence data centers. By rejecting emergency shutoffs and capacity mandates for hyperscale facilities, the commission leaves sixty-seven million people to subsidize corporate compute through soaring electric bills and blackout risks.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has ordered the Forest Service to flood national forests with commercial cattle while targeting native wolves. Behind the populist pretense of lowering grocery bills sits a predatory transfer of public commons to private agricultural wealth.

At an industry gathering in New Mexico, the Environmental Protection Agency announced sweeping rollbacks of federal methane rules to hand oil producers a $45 billion windfall. By exempting the nation’s leakiest marginal wells and terminating independent satellite oversight, regulators are subordinating atmospheric survival to fossil fuel balance sheets.