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Walking my dog. On the Metro. In line at a sandwich shop. People keep coming up and asking me about “the polls.” What do the numbers mean? Should they be worried about the election? If a set of swing state polls is released, the odds are by the end of the day I will have been asked by a friend, a relative, a neighbor, or a stranger, or several, “Did you see that poll in Nevada? Why was there a shift of three points since the last one? How could Pennsylvania be going in a different direction? And North Carolina, really? Do you think that’s accurate?” If they start referencing Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, or any of the other pollster celebs…I want to scream.

Polls, to be hyperbolic about it, have ruined American politics. Okay, a lot has ruined American politics. But polls have certainly made American politics less enjoyable. Many of those who follow politics—and not enough citizens do—have become slaves of polling, overly obsessed with these surveys and palpitating over the slightest changes. I’m not unsympathetic. This election is prompting more anxiety than most. The oft-repeated mantra that the 2024 race could determine whether the United States remains an imperfect democracy or slips toward a more authoritarian form of governance is true. Thus, every iota of data related to the face-off between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appears loaded with relevance and consequence. Still, the hyperfixation on polls is unwarranted and distracts us from other important aspects of this most important election.

Polls don’t matter. Or maybe they do. It depends on your definition of “matters.” By all measurements, this is a close race. What else do you need to know? The candidates are within a few points of each other in the national polls and the swing state polls. But the difference is usually within the reported margin of error. That means the poll that has just caused you heartburn may not have any value in terms of telling us what will happen on Election Day.

And get this: That margin of error may not even be accurate.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.”

While doing a little (but not much) research for this rant, I came across a useful article from the Pew Research Center, which does a lot of polling. It was published this summer and called “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” The piece made the usual points. In 2016 and 2020, polling underestimated Trump’s performance. (Polls on average overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength by 1.3 percent and Joe Biden’s by 3.9 percent.) The 2022 nonpartisan polls—meaning those taken by the media and research centers and not by campaigns and political groups—were more accurate than people may have assumed after the mythical “red wave” did not materialize. Polling methodologies have shifted to keep current with changes (such as the decrease in the use of landlines and a low response rate). Pollsters have improved how they weigh demographic variables to obtain representative samplings.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.” What? Read that again. Double the margin of error. “A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people,” Pew tells us, “has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points.” That’s usually the number you see associated with a poll. Three percent. That doesn’t seem so bad.

But there are other errors. If you must know, they are called noncoverage error, nonresponse error, and measurement error. I’m not going to go into the technical details here. But this is the bottom line from Pew: “The problem is that sampling error is not the only kind of error that affects a poll. Those other kinds of error, in fact, can be as large or larger than sampling error. Consequently, the reported margin of error can lead people to think that polls are more accurate than they really are…Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.”

So are you really going to pull your hair out over a poll with a margin of error of 6 points? C’mon. Get a grip.

“Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic,” wrote historian Jill Lepore.

It’s easy to be a polling Grinch. If you want to dive into such territory, I commend two well-researched articles. In 2015, historian Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy and fascinating piece in the New Yorker on the history of polling that took a dim view of this practice and decried its impact on US politics. She explored the decades-old debate among social scientists as to whether there really is such a thing as “public opinion,” questioning whether polling measures it or creates it. George Gallup, who helped invent the polling industry, believed it did exist and could be quantified for edification and profit. But Lepore offered the case that whoever was correct about this, polling and the media addiction to it is not beneficial for democracy. After citing the Gallup Poll’s former managing editor David Moore’s remark that “media polls give us distorted readings of the electoral climate, manufacture a false public consensus on policy issues, and in the process undermine American democracy,” Lepore added her own observation: “Polls don’t take the pulse of democracy; they raise it.”

Referencing Trump’s 2016 campaign, she concluded, “Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.”

Lepore might have been unduly pessimistic about pollsters meeting the technical challenges of the day, but on the Big Idea she was prescient. Picking up where she left off is Samuel Earle, a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School, who published a long essay on polling in the recent issue of the New York Review of Books. (His piece is ostensibly a review of Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliot Morris, the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, its polling review outlet.) Earle, too, wonders about the nature of public opinion and the ability to capture it. He presents a harsh history of the polling biz, noting that Gallup once said of polling, “If it works for toothpaste, why not for politics?” And he applies the Heisenberg observer effect to polling:

[E]very attempt to study how people think and act has the potential to influence how they think and act, thus changing what is being recorded, either in self-fulfilling or self-negating ways. The results of any poll on a particular issue are liable to change how people think about that issue, just as any poll showing a candidate’s popularity is liable to influence that candidate’s popularity. 

Polls are shortcuts to understanding a rather complicated matter: how millions of Americans, each operating on different levels of engagement with different levels of information, will make a specific decision. In a way, polls may be comforting, providing the fantasy of certainty (or possible certainty) in a sea of unknowing. But they can enhance anxiety and smother more substantive discussions of an election. They definitely are useful for campaigns, as the political professionals strive to find the best messages and plot out how most effectively to use their resources. Which states should we spend money on? Where should we send the candidate? What themes and ideas seem to be resonating? Let’s look at the numbers.

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture.

Earle acknowledges the benefits of polling for the pros. But he’s right when he observes, “[P]olls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces.”

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture. Here’s one crude analogy. For many years, only Hollywood insiders pored over the opening-weekend box office returns for movies. But at some point—I can’t recall when—seemingly everyone began talking about that first weekend take. The question was no longer, Is this movie good? It became, How did it do?

I’m sure we can chart how polls came to dominate political coverage. In the mid-1970s, according to Lepore, media outlets, which had previously relied on Gallup’s firm and other polling outfits, began conducting their own polls. “[W]e’ve been off to the races ever since,” she wrote. And now coverage of polls crowds out other elements of the race. When someone (like me) complains about horse-race political journalism, this is often what they have in mind.

Here’s a recent example. When Harris earlier this month proposed expanding Medicare to include home health care, the New York Times placed its story on this plan on page A12. On the front page, the top story was a report on the new swing state polls the newspaper had conducted with Siena College. The Times was promoting its own polling and—with other outlets picking up these findings—creating a news cycle. Yet Harris’ proposal could affect millions of Americans. It was arguably more consequential than the polls of the moment. Adhering to its basic precepts of politics coverage, the editors of the Times deemed those surveys more important.

There’s plenty more to say about polls. Political pros and amateurs love debating which ones are more accurate and how they are used or abused. (Some libs have recently been complaining that Republicans are producing junk polling that shows Trump in a better position in order to rig the national averages of polls in his favor.) Politicos assess how to recalibrate this year’s surveys according to various factors. (What if the current polls are wrong in the way the 2020 polls were wrong? What if they are wrong in the way some of the 2022 polls were wrong?) Polling is a cottage industry. Dissecting polls is one as well. Or perhaps a hobby. Like fantasy football. (At least in fantasy football you pick and manage your team and possess some agency.)

You will note that I’ve managed to get through this diatribe without declaring that a poll is just a snapshot in time and that the only poll that counts is on Election Day. More to the point, polls are the sugar high and empty calories of politics. And they make for lazy—or, at least, easy—journalism. I’d rather see reporters dig into other stuff. The ties between right-wing extremism and the GOP, the dirty deeds being perpetuated by billionaire-funded super-PACs, the role of dark money and disinformation in this campaign, the how-this-affects-you implications of the candidates’ positions. I bet that if you asked voters and news consumers, a majority would agree. Let’s poll that.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in northeast Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply, which was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.

“I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

The restarting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking—or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand, and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.

“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking,” and boasted of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.

This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells have exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.

“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.

Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff.”

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Victoria Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started.

“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.

“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect—there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.

“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started. Like Kemble, she now gets bottled water deliveries each week from Coterra.

“But then the other guy [Trump] just says, ‘We’ll drill more, we’ll get rid of the regulations’—so that should scare us. People are held hostage by the fossil-fuel industry here.”

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry.”

Although 1.5 million people across Pennsylvania live within half a mile of oil and gas wells, compressors and processors, not all feel as sharply affected by fracking and to win the state’s crucial 19 electoral votes, according to prevailing political thinking, means not threatening an industry that directly employs around 16,000 people, around 0.5 percent of all jobs in the state.

“Fracking has become a big part of the election but there really isn’t much opposition to it now, it’s become part of life in Pennsylvania,” said Jeff Brauer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College. “A fracking ban would be very unpopular and Kamala Harris knows she can’t be against fracking if she’s going to win here. She had to clean that up.”

But how popular is fracking? Polling shows a complicated picture rather than overwhelming support, with two 2020 surveys showing slightly more Pennsylvania voters want to ban fracking than keep it, while a separate 2022 poll found the reverse. Unusually, Pennsylvania’s constitution enshrines the right to “clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment,” unlike neighboring New York, which is among a handful of states to ban fracking.

“The idea you have to court some fictional rural fracking supporter with Trump signs in their yard is ludicrous,” said Josh Fox, a filmmaker and activist whose 2010 documentary, Gasland, showed people in Dimock and elsewhere holding up jars of muddy brown drinking water and turning their tap water into a roaring flame by lighting it.

“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry,” he said. Fox added he will still vote for Harris but that “Democrats have thrown away a chance to tell people in rural Pennsylvania they will fight to protect their children from toxins. It’s a legacy of moral failure going back to Obama.”

In Dimock, particular ire is reserved for Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who in his previous role as state attorney general in 2020 convened a grand jury and charged Coterra, then known as Cabot, prior to a merger, with eight felonies for endangering the town’s drinking water. “There were failures at every level,” Shapiro claimed, pointing to testimony of children in Dimock waking up with severe nosebleeds because of the pollution exposure.

Yet, the denouement of the case in a local courtroom in 2022 unveiled a deal in which all the felony charges were dropped, with Coterra pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor in return for the company agreeing to build a new $16 million water pipe for residents. Crucially, on the same day, the state department of environmental protection—which had found Coterra tainted 19 private wells and barred drilling in the Dimock area for more than a decade—allowed the company back into the region.

“I was shocked. I was a fan of Shapiro but he betrayed us. He betrayed me,” said Switzer, who took part in a press conference with Shapiro, prior to knowing details of the deal, where she praised the then attorney general.

“It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“I wish I could retract that. I would’ve called out that traitor Shapiro if I’d known,” she said. “We walked into a trap that allowed the drilling to restart. I mean, when I heard he was in the mix to be vice president I almost threw up.”

A spokesman for Shapiro said he is an “an all-of-the-above energy governor, and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today.” The settlement with Coterra is “historic,” the spokesman said, and that the governor “will never forget the people of Dimock.” Coterra did not respond to a request for comment.

The water line should emerge by the end of 2026, although construction of it, unlike the new drilling, has yet to start. Coterra is not allowed to drill directly in the heart of Dimock but can do so at its edges, and already has three towering well complexes boring 7,000 feet down into a section of the Marcellus shale, a thick formation of layered, radioactive rock, which contains about 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas worth an estimated $3.9 billion.

From these wellheads sprout 11 drilling lines, known as laterals, that bend underground horizontally and snake for several miles underneath about 80 Dimock properties, with one running directly under Switzer’s house. “They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese,” she said.

The rumbling from a new oil pad two miles away keeps Switzer awake at night, as does the hundreds of trucks shuttling the vast cocktail of water, sand, and chemicals used in fracking. “I can’t sleep now, so I find it harder to take than I once did,” she said. “We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart.”

This new drilling requires Coterra to monitor local water supplies, plug the older gas wells that dot this rolling landscape and provide water to residents. Still, avoiding further contamination as the drills pierce the water table, via failures in the drill casings or leaks of the substances used to pry open the shale for its gas, cannot be fully assured.

“The operations are on a much larger scale now, using millions of gallons more water, so no company can guarantee there will be no further leaks. Once wells are drilled they will leak,” said Anthony Ingraffea, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has advised affected residents.

“The nine square miles of Dimock is a goldmine of natural gas. It’s the most productive in the world,” Ingraffea said. “Coterra will be happy getting hold of that in return for a water pipeline that I don’t think will ever be built. It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”

“One of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful… There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Much of the newly drilled gas will be shipped overseas and marketed as a “clean” fuel in a process that, in fact, emits more planet-heating pollution than coal. The fracking itself, which is exempt from certain clean water regulations, will also pose fresh health risks, with studies showing that Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are at heightened risk of childhood lymphoma, asthma, preterm births and low birth weights.

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, only regulates 29 out of more than 1,100 shale gas contaminants potentially found in drinking water, with a 2016 federal report acknowledging that wells in 27 Dimock homes contain unhealthy levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and copper, with 17 of these homes at risk of exploding because of the build-up of flammable gas.

For Kemble, the resumption of drilling is the final straw after years of him and his neighbors suffering cancers he believes is a result of the air and water pollution. Kemble said he has rigged up cameras at his home and fears he could be targeted for his activism.

Despite the pressure around being outspoken, Kemble said: “I’m still here…but one of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful in Yellowstone one day. There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”

Kemble, who hauls water from a hydrant to a huge water tank that he then has to filter into his house, recently donated his home to a new research nonprofit that will test the property’s water, soil, and plants for contamination to help inform potential new laws. He will soon leave Dimock, his home of 30 years, like others have done before him, because of the water.

“This is my final fuck you to everybody; there’s going to be a scientist behind every tree here,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, all the stories and all the fucking crap. I want the hell out of here.”

Steve Bannon was indicted in 2020 for allegedly helping defraud Donald Trump fans who donated to a nonprofit that promised to privately fund a border wall. The other defendants in the plot went to prison. But in the final hours of his presidency, Trump pardoned Bannon, reportedly over the objections of various advisers, due to what the Washington Post described as Bannon’s “vociferous support” for Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.

Trump doled out pardons and commutations throughout his presidency, culminating in a deluge of clemency during his final weeks office. He pardoned service members accused of war crimes whose cases were promoted on Fox News; Lil Wayne; most of the Republican congressmen convicted of federal felonies this century; the ex-husband of an unctuous Fox News host; and a former Dick Cheney aide whose pardon might irk former FBI chief James Comey. He even pardoned some people who probably deserved it.

But many of his pardons, like the one he gave Bannon, were clearly corrupt—a misuse of power to benefit his supporters and please his allies. Trump may have acted legally in exercising his constitutional pardon power, but that doesn’t make his actions any more defensible. He granted pardons in apparent exchange for political support, to campaign donors, and to clients of lawyers charging small fortunes for access to him. He dangled the possibility pardons for potential witnesses who might testify about his campaign’s ties to Russia.

This orgy of transactional clemency was a preview of the authoritarian powers Trump has promised to wield without restraint in a second term. Trump has pledged to pardon people charged with crimes connected to January 6 and, if he wins, he’ss expected to claim power to order the DOJ to drop the two federal cases against him. And he appears prepared to use his power to block federal charges against federal officials who commit alleged crimes in service of his goals.

Here is a non-complete list of some of Trump’s most outrageous pardons.

Friends and Family of Jared

Trump’s process for assessing pardon pleas in his final days in office was reportedly chaotic, with little involvement from the DOJ office tasked with assisting federal clemency efforts. Instead, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, oversaw the process. Many people with connections to Kushner won pardons, most notably his father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, who was convicted in 2005 of crimes that included hiring a prostitute to film herself having sex with his sister’s husband, a way to punish her for cooperating in a federal investigation. Trump’s pardon announcement did not mention what role Jared may have played in helping his dad. A Kushner spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Kushner-connected pardon recipients include 27 people with ties two Orthodox Jewish organizations that had worked with Kushner on criminal justice reform, the New York Times reported. Several of those hired pro-Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz, who advised Kushner on Middle East policy and represented Trump during his first impeachment trial, to help them seek pardons.

That group includes Jonathan Braun, a Staten Island man whose 10-year sentence for drug dealing Trump commuted even as Braun was under investigation for his role in a loan-sharking scheme in which the defendants were accused of repeatedly threatening violence. A federal judge fined Braun for $20 million in February. In August, Braun was arrested and charged with assaulting his wife and her 75-year old father.

Another Dershowitz client who won a commutation was Eliyahu Weinstein, who Trump freed eight years into a 24-year sentence for running a ponzi scheme. Weinstein was indicted last year for allegedly running a new, similar scheme, that prosecutors said he launched “soon after” his release.

Ken Kurson, a close friend of Kushner’s, received a pardon for charges that he had cyber-stalked and harassed three people. In 2022, Kurson pleaded guilty to cyberstalking his ex-wife.

Anyone Who Might Support Him

Trump has mostly pardoned Republicans, but he did help a few Democrats. He pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of attempting to sell a Senate appointment and who had appeared on “The Apprentice” in 2010. Since the pardon, Blagojevich has supported Trump. Trump in 2021 also commuted the 28-year prison sentence that former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick received for extensive corruption. Kilpatrick is now campaigning for Trump, explaining that he is “grateful” for Trump’s help.

In 2019, Angela Stanton, who was convicted in 2004 for her role in a car theft ring and later supported Trump’s foray into criminal justice reform, appeared on a Fox News panel of Black voters as a Trump supporter. In 2020, Trump pardoned Stanton.

Alice Johnson, a woman whose decades-long sentence for cocaine distribution Trump commuted in 2018, appeared in a 2020 Trump campaign ad that aired during the Super Bowl. Johnson also spoke in support of him at during the Republican National Convention that year. Trump granted her a full pardon the next day.

Celebrities

Trump’s 2021 pardon of Lil Wayne came after the rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, endorsed him (and hired a lawyer who previously had appeared on the “Apprentice” in 2004). Kodak Black, another rapper, who was freed from prison when Trump pardoned him, released a pro-Trump song in August. Trump also pardoned Casey Urlacher on charges of helping run a massive gambling ring, after meeting months earlier with Urlacher’s brother, former Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher. The former All-Pro endorsed Trump in September and cut an ad for him.

Medicare Fraudsters

Trump’s cross-aisle pardons included Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye-doctor who was a financial backer and friend of former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). A hung jury in 2017 helped Menendez avoid conviction on charges that he did political favors for Melgen in exchange for financial benefits. (Menendez was convicted in July 2024 in a different corruption case.)

Unlike Menendez, Melgen was convicted in 2017 on 67 counts related to bilking Medicare out of at least $73 million by persuading numerous elderly patients to undergo tests and get treatment for diseases they did not have. Trump’s pardon of Melgen, which came after a request from Menendez, is one of at least five the former president granted to people convicted of defrauding Medicare or Medicaid, the Washington Post noted in March. Such pardons coexist uneasily with Trump’s claim that he would cut federal spending on those programs by cracking down on fraud.

Of particular note, Trump pardoned Philip Esformes—who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in stealing more than $1.3 billion from federal programs via fraudulent billing at nursing homes he owned—after his father gave $65,000 to a Kushner-linked charity. Esformes was recently arrested on felony charges related to domestic violence.

People With Connected Lawyers

Trump’s willingness to grant pardons created a robust market for people claiming they had the president’s ear. Former Trump lawyer John Dowd reportedly earned tens of thousands of dollars securing a pardon for a Las Vegas gambler, William Walters, sentenced to prison in 2017 for insider trading. That’s nothing compared to Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, who disclosed receiving $750,000 to lobby for pardon for man named Parker Petit, who was convicted in 2020 of accounting fraud—even though Petit didn’t get a pardon. Rudy Giuliani has denied multiple claims that he requested $2 million to help pardon-seekers get Trump’s attention. Bradley Birkenfeld, a man convicted of fraud in 2008, told the Atlantic in 2021 that former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski had demanded $500,000 to meet with Trump about a pardon and $1 million more if Trump granted it. Lewandowski denied that claim.

Russia, Russia, Russia

Trump’s attraction to revenge pardons and personal interest combined in his wiliness to undo charges against those caught in investigations into his campaign’s connections to Russia.

Trump pardoned even minor figures convicted of crimes in the scandal, such as George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who a Trump aide dismissed in 2017 as mere “coffee boy.” Trump pardoned Paul Erickson, a marginal Republican operative best known for dating convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. In a statement at the time, Trump said Erickson’s conviction “was based off the Russian collusion hoax.” In fact, Erickson pleaded guilty to defrauding would-be real estate investors in North Dakota in a scheme unrelated to the Russian matter.

Trump pardoned longtime adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted in 2019 of lying to Congress about his role in helping Trump benefit from Democrats’ emails hacked by Russian agents. Stone was “covering up for the president” when he lied to the House Intelligence Committee, Judge Amy Jackson Berman said while sentencing him. Trump’s pardon of former national security adviser Michael Flynn similarly appeared to reward loyalty. Flynn in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia. Just before Flynn’s plea, Dowd, the Trump lawyer, left a voicemail for a Flynn attorney in which he asked for a “heads up” if there was any “information that implicates the president.” Dowd added: “Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feeling toward Flynn, and all that still remains.” Dowd has denied that he was dangling a pardon. Flynn later attempted to reverse his plea. And he never did implicate Trump in wrongdoing.

Nowhere did Trump use his pardon power more successfully than with Paul Manafort. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s team prosecuted Manafort over his secret lobbying for Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president and untaxed payments Manafort received, Trump “made it known that Manafort could receive a pardon,” Mueller later reported. Manafort did eventually plead guilty to some charges and signed a cooperation agreement. But prosecutors later determined he had likely lied to them. He even funneled information on the investigation to Trump’s lawyers, in an apparent effort to remain in line for the pardon Trump finally delivered in 2020.

While working for Trump’s campaign in 2016, Manafort met secretly with a suspected Russian agent to discuss winning Trump’s support for a plan to settle the conflict then occurring in eastern Ukraine by essentially handing control of the region to Moscow. It’s unclear what if anything Manafort said to Trump about this supposed peace plan at the time. But eight years later, following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Trump says he has a solution that would end the war in Ukraine immediately. His new plan sounds something like the idea Manafort discussed back in 2016.

Jeff VanderMeer insists that he does not predict the future. Yet mere weeks before his new novel, Absolution, hit shelves, Hurricane Helene tore through the part of Florida where he lives, sharing an uncanny likeness to the fictional hurricane in his book. Of course, there’s a difference between art and reality. The through line between the storms is the climate crisis that inspired VanderMeer to write the trilogy of books that made him a household name a decade ago. 

Absolution is the latest and last installment in the lush, eerie series covering an unknown biological phenomenon known as Area X, located in VanderMeer’s home state of Florida in the real place known as the Forgotten Coast. The original trio of books covers the area and its tendency to affect living creatures and create bizarre refractions of life within its confines. The series, called the Southern Reach trilogy, garnered enormous praise, a legion of fans, and a movie adaptation. For the record, VanderMeer told me he found Hollywood “frustrating” because “they stripped out all the environmental stuff.” But he did enjoy the movie’s surreal ending. 

“We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative.”

A decade later, Absolution marks the conclusion of a weird and wonderful journey involving an assortment of biological abnormalities and government secrets. In the meantime, it seems as if the unusual world that VanderMeer wrote about and the one that we live in today are growing closer and closer. Our warmer world is not just more volatile in terms of natural disasters, like Helene and Milton, but it is also becoming a large-scale petri-dish for new diseases, the type of biological mixing and matching that VanderMeer’s books are known for—albeit on a much smaller scale. 

In VanderMeer’s fiction, the mirror world of Area X produced strange, haunting results like a character’s transformation into a whale-like creature covered in eyes, or a murderous bear with a human voice. But for VanderMeer, climate change is the scariest thing of all. 

I spoke with him just as he was returning to his home in Tallahassee after evacuating from Hurricane Helene. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What is it like being a climate and science fiction writer right now? 

I guess it feels like kind of a privilege to be able to talk about this stuff, that the novels have reached enough readers and had enough of an impact that anyone cares what I have to say.

It’s also true that I’m right now in Florida, at the epicenter of a lot of extreme weather events. And so that creates a weird echoing effect. For example, I was fleeing Hurricane Helene up to Greenville, South Carolina, unsure if that was even the right thing to do. And then also asked by the New York Times to write a piece about fleeing the hurricane. So there’s all this real-world consequence. 

You’re getting me at the end of fleeing a hurricane, writing about it, coming back to Tallahassee, seeing the consequences of extreme weather because of warming waters because of climate crisis, and feeling both thankful that I can kind of capture a feeling people have here about these events and write about it, but also kind of caught up in it as well.

That sounds pretty jarring.

You can get in loops too, where you don’t really adapt to the situation and you’re just doing the same talking points which, relevant to your question, is something I worry about. You know, where [people on the internet] were saying, “Well, why did people even build in Asheville?” it was this weird disconnect. And it’s like, “Well, because they didn’t expect there’d be these mega-storms that would still have a huge effect, hundreds of miles inland.”

People in the aftermath of destruction seem to want to try to form their own narratives about what’s happening, and I’m sure you are someone who see this clearly, being in the epicenter, but also being someone who works in fiction.

It’s definitely something that I write about in my fiction: the idea of character agency in the face of systemic or system-wide events, whether they’re human systems or systems in the natural world. Especially in Western fiction, we have this idea of rugged individualism, right? And by the end of the narrative, things will have gone back to normal, because something’s been solved.

That’s not really what happens in the real world. We get displaced. We have to be resilient. We have to form a new narrative. We’re not always the same person we were before, you know, especially with regard to the climate crisis. And so I try to capture that. There’s a hurricane in Absolution that comes up suddenly in the middle of all these other events. And I really wanted to capture how a hurricane these days can seem like an uncanny event, even to those of us who are familiar with them. 

“People think the climate crisis is on the horizon…But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.”

Helene, to be candid, scared the crap out of me when I saw it coming to Tallahassee with 150 mile per hour winds. A lot of people decamped from Tallahassee up into North Carolina, and then were completely trapped. People think the climate crisis is on the horizon, and if they think that it’s because they haven’t been affected by it yet. But more and more, we’re all being affected by it.

In this book, Absolution, and in all the books, there are these in-group, out-group dynamics, and I’m just wondering, why is that something that you’re really interested in exploring narratively?

I’m trying to explore the psychological reality of being in these situations. I’m not trying to extrapolate, I’m not trying to predict. I’m simply trying to show what people are like facing these kinds of choices. Because, you know, people talk a lot about the landscapes and uncanny events, but they’re all filtered through a particular character point of view. And I often ask myself, is this person open to what’s happening or are they closed? Are they in denial? Are they understanding to some degree? Are they trying to form connections or are they disconnected and alienated? These are some of the issues that we find in modern times.

How do you talk to scientists? Because this series is very science-based, but the emotional resonance of why people are drawn to science is something that comes through a lot. 

My dad is a research chemist and entomologist who’s always headed up or been part of some lab, usually like fire ants and other invasive species. And so I grew up around these kinds of places. My mom was a biological illustrator for many years, and so that also brought a kind of a scientific element to her art. And between those two kinds of locations, I got to see the real human side of science. 

I think that actually really helps, along with going on actual scientific expeditions with my dad to Fiji as a kid, it’s just kind of intrinsically in you at that point that you have an understanding of science. I was really quite lucky in that regard.

What was helpful to you to get this book across the finish line?

One thing that was helpful is that there’s actually a lot of humor in it. I don’t like to write books that are monotone. Even in Annihilation, in the earlier books, there’s some sly humor going on. Here, I think it’s a little more overt in some of the relationships and some of what the secret agency is doing that’s so absurd. And then in the last section, especially with this very dysfunctional, almost tech bro-esque personality that’s in this expedition. It’s kind of unintentionally funny. That’s something that anchors me, because it gives me pleasure to write, along with the uncanny stuff.

What’s the role of fiction at this point in the climate crisis? 

I think one thing I don’t want the books to do when they skirt the edge of “prediction” is to be unrealistic. I get asked a question a lot, “Where’s the hope in your books?” or things like that. And it’s like, I don’t want the hope, I want the analysis. And I don’t want the faux analysis where we’re doing like carbon offsets that are meaningless. I don’t want to put that in my book as something that’s viable. 

I think that what fiction adds is—it’s kind of like: What do you get from religion versus science, or what do you get from philosophy rather than science? Fiction is not science, but it can give you this immersive three-dimensional reality of what it’s like to be in a situation, and it can bring your imagination to it in such a way that it really lives in your body to some degree. 

And so I think that’s why the thing that makes me most happy is having people come up to me and say that Annihilation was one reason they became a marine biologist or went into environmental science, that there was something about the character of the biologists in that book that was compelling to them. That to me, is what fiction can provide.

After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.

The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”

“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.

The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”

“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and Doctors for Harris did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.

Two weeks from Tuesday, millions of voters across the country will fan out to polling places.

And when they do, there will reportedly be a GOP-backed, 200,000-strong army of volunteers watching them. Their task? “Establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.

That’s according to a new report in the New Yorker that sheds light on the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s plan—led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and Michael Whatley, its co-chairs—to use a giant grassroots group of Trump worshippers to question the integrity of the election.

In June, the RNC announced that the so-called “Protect the Vote” tour would make a series of stops in swing states to “train volunteers to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat this November.” (Never mind that research shows voter fraud is quite rare; that Republican-led gerrymandering has helped enshrine minority rule, as my colleague Ari Berman has covered; and that Trump still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election—despite more than 60 failed legal challenges affirming that he did.)

According to the New Yorker, much of the RNC’s strategy relies on indulging supporters’ paranoia over conspiracy theories about a Democrat-coordinated campaign to steal the election—via the usual suspects, undocumented immigrants and dead people—and training volunteers to be “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign,” as far-right Internet personality Jack Posobiec put it. If they suspect fraud, the volunteers are told, they should call the RNC’s “election integrity hotline,” which a team of volunteer attorneys will apparently answer.

The irony is that poll watching has, historically, been an important safeguard of democracy. Poll watchers helped implement the Voting Rights Act, for example, ensuring election workers were actually allowing Black people to vote. But experts also say that without clear guidelines—and under Trump’s GOP—the practice can help foment Election Day discord.

Recent history offers proof: In 2020, mostly white Republican poll watchers—including five activists linked to the Trump campaign—heckled mostly Black election workers in Detroit and spread disproven rumors of fraud, chanting “stop the count,” as NBC News recently investigated. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than a quarter of Republicans—compared with 14 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats—believe poll watchers should be armed. And nearly a fifth of Republicans surveyed said that if Trump loses, he should contest the results and do “whatever it takes” to assume the presidency—compared with 12 percent of Democrats saying the same of Harris.

The GOP is not waiting until Election Day to stoke doubt, though: The RNC has already filed dozens of “election integrity” lawsuits across the country, which challenge absentee and mail-in ballots and try to make it easier to purge voter rolls and allow local officials to refuse to certify elections, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote. As one expert told her, their forethought should be a warning to the rest of us:

“In 2020, the attempt to undermine election results by the Trump campaign [was] more of an afterthought,” says Sylvia Albert, who runs voting and election projects at Common Cause, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “Now it looks like a cohesive party strategy nationwide, and it’s not an afterthought. The lesson we’ve taken is to prepare for it.”

After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.

While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024

Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”

Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.

This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.

Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.

With just over two weeks until Election Day, both candidates are plunging into nonstop rallies and interviews in a bid to get in front of as many voters as possible. (Though notably, Trump has backed out of several recent high profile media appearances, including a sit-down with 60 Minutes.)

Vice President Kamala Harris sat for a contentious exchange with Fox News host Bret Baier this week, and headlined rallies in the swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, sank to new lows during a suite of appearances—lobbing crude insults at his opponents and rambling incoherently. Let’s review Trump’s very weird week, which, even by Trumpian standards of shock, veered into increasingly alarming territory. Let’s go day-by-day:

Monday

At a Pennsylvania town hall Monday night, Trump ranted about Hannibal Lecter, renewed his longstanding attacks on the “fake news,” and then abandoned answering questions entirely to listen to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA” for a half hour as he swayed on stage.

"Turn it up louder!" — Trump calls for Ave Maria to be played again while his favorite chart is displayed, which he says "I sleep with every night. I kiss it." pic.twitter.com/bLCOBNuCjI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 14, 2024

Tuesday

At an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait on immigration and economic policy, Trump took a question about inflation as an opportunity to bash Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), an architect of the Green New Deal: “She never even studied the environment in college. She went to a nice college. She came out. She just said—the Green New Scam. She just named all these things.” (Ocasio-Cortez studied international relations and economics at Boston University.)

That exchange was indicative of the interview at large: While Micklethwait repeatedly pressed Trump on the specifics of his economic policies and their potential impacts—higher prices due to tariffs, the loss of immigrant labor due to his proposed mass deportation plan—the former president went on tangent after tangent. When Micklethwait asked him if Google should be broken up, for example, Trump responded with a grievance about voting in Virginia. When the host called him out for his meandering, Trump offered his now-common but unsatisfying explanation: “It’s called the weave.” Other highlights: Trump called Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) “Newscum” and claimed the insurrection represented “a peaceful transfer of power.”

Trump: New scum I call him

Micklethwait: There are CEOs out here if they said that sort of thing about a rival CEO they would be sacked.

Trump: They don't have to go through pic.twitter.com/eqbLuTwaaN

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 15, 2024

And at an all-women’s town hall hosted by Fox News host Harris Faulkner taped Tuesday, Trump called himself “the father of IVF”… despite the fact that the Dobbs decision—which he made possible by appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade—has undermined IVF access and Senate Republicans twice blocked a vote on a Democrat-led bill to protect the fertility treatment.

Trump: “I’m the father of IVF”

FACT CHECK: IVF is under threat across the country because Trump ended Roe v. Wade and his Project 2025 plan could effectively ban IVF altogether. pic.twitter.com/tEOUiufDjO

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 16, 2024

His campaign dismissed the bizarre remark as a joke. But as former President Barack Obama said at a rally for Harris in Arizona Friday night: “I do not know what that means. You do not either.”

Wednesday

At a town hall for Latino voters hosted by Univision, Trump called Jan. 6, 2021—the day he unleashed a mob on the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election—”a day of love.” He also falsely claimed “nobody died” other than Ashli Babbitt, and “there were no guns.” January 6, as my colleague Mark Follman has covered extensively, was in fact a heavily armed insurrection.

He also doubled down on the racist lies his campaign helped spread about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating house pets, claiming without evidence they are “eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”

Question: Do you really believe that these people are eating people’s pets?

Trump: I was just saying what was reported. And eating other things too that they’re not supposed to. pic.twitter.com/GAXezwPkqe

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 16, 2024

Friday

During a sit-down with Fox and Friends, Trump took viewers’ questions… including softballs from children who asked about his favorite animal and favorite former president. We’ll just leave one of his responses here:

A six-year-old asks Donald Trump what his favorite farm animal is:

"I love cows. But if we go with Kamala you won't have any cows anymore. I don't want to ruin this kid's day. I love cows, I think they're so cute and so beautiful."pic.twitter.com/qNxVPQ2suQ

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) October 18, 2024

Saturday

To cap it all off, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump called Harris a “shit vice president” and spoke about the penis size of golfer Arnold Palmer. Yes… really.

Trump: You’re a shit Vice President pic.twitter.com/cB2w7nknQM

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 19, 2024

Trump 10 minutes into his Arnold Palmer story: But when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, oh my God. That's unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/kRLKWixpT8

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 19, 2024

All this makes it no wonder, then, that Harris is drawing voters’ attention to Trump’s rambling incoherency and insults. “He has called it the weave,” she said at a rally in Detroit Saturday. “I think we here will call it nonsense.”

Correction, Oct. 20: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as the former VP.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.

“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition.

If you’re a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms.

Earn money for supporting something you already believe in!

Offer valid until midnight on Monday.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 18, 2024

This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition.

However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians.

According to the site, the goal is to get “1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

The tech CEO tweeted this offer shortly after hosting his first solo political event at a Pennsylvania town hall on Friday night, in which he reportedly peddled debunked election conspiracy theories.

While this petition isn’t his only bid to flip the swing state in Trump’s favor, (last week, Musk offered to go door-to-door in Pennsylvania to petition for the former president), it’s certainly one of his stupidest ones.

As my colleague Tim Murphy writes :

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.

It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. 

On Saturday, Musk will speak at a Pennsylvania megachurch with strong ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, a religious movement that believes Christians are called to take over the government.

Correction, October 19: An earlier version misstated the date of the tweet. It was tweeted on Thursday, October 17.

After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.

The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”

“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.

The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”

“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and Doctors for Harris did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.

Two weeks from Tuesday, millions of voters across the country will fan out to polling places.

And when they do, there will reportedly be a GOP-backed, 200,000-strong army of volunteers watching them. Their task? “Establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.

That’s according to a new report in the New Yorker that sheds light on the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s plan—led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and Michael Whatley, its co-chairs—to use a giant grassroots group of Trump worshippers to question the integrity of the election.

In June, the RNC announced that the so-called “Protect the Vote” tour would make a series of stops in swing states to “train volunteers to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat this November.” (Never mind that research shows voter fraud is quite rare; that Republican-led gerrymandering has helped enshrine minority rule, as my colleague Ari Berman has covered; and that Trump still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election—despite more than 60 failed legal challenges affirming that he did.)

According to the New Yorker, much of the RNC’s strategy relies on indulging supporters’ paranoia over conspiracy theories about a Democrat-coordinated campaign to steal the election—via the usual suspects, undocumented immigrants and dead people—and training volunteers to be “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign,” as far-right Internet personality Jack Posobiec put it. If they suspect fraud, the volunteers are told, they should call the RNC’s “election integrity hotline,” which a team of volunteer attorneys will apparently answer.

The irony is that poll watching has, historically, been an important safeguard of democracy. Poll watchers helped implement the Voting Rights Act, for example, ensuring election workers were actually allowing Black people to vote. But experts also say that without clear guidelines—and under Trump’s GOP—the practice can help foment Election Day discord.

Recent history offers proof: In 2020, mostly white Republican poll watchers—including five activists linked to the Trump campaign—heckled mostly Black election workers in Detroit and spread disproven rumors of fraud, chanting “stop the count,” as NBC News recently investigated. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than a quarter of Republicans—compared with 14 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats—believe poll watchers should be armed. And nearly a fifth of Republicans surveyed said that if Trump loses, he should contest the results and do “whatever it takes” to assume the presidency—compared with 12 percent of Democrats saying the same of Harris.

The GOP is not waiting until Election Day to stoke doubt, though: The RNC has already filed dozens of “election integrity” lawsuits across the country, which challenge absentee and mail-in ballots and try to make it easier to purge voter rolls and allow local officials to refuse to certify elections, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote. As one expert told her, their forethought should be a warning to the rest of us:

“In 2020, the attempt to undermine election results by the Trump campaign [was] more of an afterthought,” says Sylvia Albert, who runs voting and election projects at Common Cause, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “Now it looks like a cohesive party strategy nationwide, and it’s not an afterthought. The lesson we’ve taken is to prepare for it.”

After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.

While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024

Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”

Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.

This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.

Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.

With just over two weeks until Election Day, both candidates are plunging into nonstop rallies and interviews in a bid to get in front of as many voters as possible. (Though notably, Trump has backed out of several recent high profile media appearances, including a sit-down with 60 Minutes.)

Vice President Kamala Harris sat for a contentious exchange with Fox News host Bret Baier this week, and headlined rallies in the swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, sank to new lows during a suite of appearances—lobbing crude insults at his opponents and rambling incoherently. Let’s review Trump’s very weird week, which, even by Trumpian standards of shock, veered into increasingly alarming territory. Let’s go day-by-day:

Monday

At a Pennsylvania town hall Monday night, Trump ranted about Hannibal Lecter, renewed his longstanding attacks on the “fake news,” and then abandoned answering questions entirely to listen to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA” for a half hour as he swayed on stage.

"Turn it up louder!" — Trump calls for Ave Maria to be played again while his favorite chart is displayed, which he says "I sleep with every night. I kiss it." pic.twitter.com/bLCOBNuCjI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 14, 2024

Tuesday

At an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait on immigration and economic policy, Trump took a question about inflation as an opportunity to bash Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), an architect of the Green New Deal: “She never even studied the environment in college. She went to a nice college. She came out. She just said—the Green New Scam. She just named all these things.” (Ocasio-Cortez studied international relations and economics at Boston University.)

That exchange was indicative of the interview at large: While Micklethwait repeatedly pressed Trump on the specifics of his economic policies and their potential impacts—higher prices due to tariffs, the loss of immigrant labor due to his proposed mass deportation plan—the former president went on tangent after tangent. When Micklethwait asked him if Google should be broken up, for example, Trump responded with a grievance about voting in Virginia. When the host called him out for his meandering, Trump offered his now-common but unsatisfying explanation: “It’s called the weave.” Other highlights: Trump called Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) “Newscum” and claimed the insurrection represented “a peaceful transfer of power.”

Trump: New scum I call him

Micklethwait: There are CEOs out here if they said that sort of thing about a rival CEO they would be sacked.

Trump: They don't have to go through pic.twitter.com/eqbLuTwaaN

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 15, 2024

And at an all-women’s town hall hosted by Fox News host Harris Faulkner taped Tuesday, Trump called himself “the father of IVF”… despite the fact that the Dobbs decision—which he made possible by appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade—has undermined IVF access and Senate Republicans twice blocked a vote on a Democrat-led bill to protect the fertility treatment.

Trump: “I’m the father of IVF”

FACT CHECK: IVF is under threat across the country because Trump ended Roe v. Wade and his Project 2025 plan could effectively ban IVF altogether. pic.twitter.com/tEOUiufDjO

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 16, 2024

His campaign dismissed the bizarre remark as a joke. But as former President Barack Obama said at a rally for Harris in Arizona Friday night: “I do not know what that means. You do not either.”

Wednesday

At a town hall for Latino voters hosted by Univision, Trump called Jan. 6, 2021—the day he unleashed a mob on the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election—”a day of love.” He also falsely claimed “nobody died” other than Ashli Babbitt, and “there were no guns.” January 6, as my colleague Mark Follman has covered extensively, was in fact a heavily armed insurrection.

He also doubled down on the racist lies his campaign helped spread about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating house pets, claiming without evidence they are “eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”

Question: Do you really believe that these people are eating people’s pets?

Trump: I was just saying what was reported. And eating other things too that they’re not supposed to. pic.twitter.com/GAXezwPkqe

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 16, 2024

Friday

During a sit-down with Fox and Friends, Trump took viewers’ questions… including softballs from children who asked about his favorite animal and favorite former president. We’ll just leave one of his responses here:

A six-year-old asks Donald Trump what his favorite farm animal is:

"I love cows. But if we go with Kamala you won't have any cows anymore. I don't want to ruin this kid's day. I love cows, I think they're so cute and so beautiful."pic.twitter.com/qNxVPQ2suQ

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) October 18, 2024

Saturday

To cap it all off, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump called Harris a “shit vice president” and spoke about the penis size of golfer Arnold Palmer. Yes… really.

Trump: You’re a shit Vice President pic.twitter.com/cB2w7nknQM

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 19, 2024

Trump 10 minutes into his Arnold Palmer story: But when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, oh my God. That's unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/kRLKWixpT8

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 19, 2024

All this makes it no wonder, then, that Harris is drawing voters’ attention to Trump’s rambling incoherency and insults. “He has called it the weave,” she said at a rally in Detroit Saturday. “I think we here will call it nonsense.”

Correction, Oct. 20: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as the former VP.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multidecade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.

“You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies.”

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs—man-made approximations—to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water—they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition.

If you’re a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms.

Earn money for supporting something you already believe in!

Offer valid until midnight on Monday.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 18, 2024

This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition.

However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians.

According to the site, the goal is to get “1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

The tech CEO tweeted this offer shortly after hosting his first solo political event at a Pennsylvania town hall on Friday night, in which he reportedly peddled debunked election conspiracy theories.

While this petition isn’t his only bid to flip the swing state in Trump’s favor, (last week, Musk offered to go door-to-door in Pennsylvania to petition for the former president), it’s certainly one of his stupidest ones.

As my colleague Tim Murphy writes :

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.

It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. 

On Saturday, Musk will speak at a Pennsylvania megachurch with strong ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, a religious movement that believes Christians are called to take over the government.

Correction, October 19: An earlier version misstated the date of the tweet. It was tweeted on Thursday, October 17.

Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for? 

Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans, including a new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump. 

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

This week on Reveal, we hear from voters at the Republican National Convention, a graduate from a historically Black university whose star is rising on the right after appearing in a viral video hugging Trump at a Chick-fil-A, and a Republican organizing other Black voters to turn out for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Here’s me, explaining more about what to expect from the episode:

Black voters are at the center of the fight for the election, as Dems scramble to shore up support from Black men.

In a NEW episode of @reveal, @garrison_hayes brings us into his months talking to Black conservatives about Trump's allure.

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— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 20, 2024

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Approval of the construction of two gas power plants without public comment. Another’s expansion approved without an environmental review. 

New fees for homeowners with rooftop solar that the Arizona attorney general has called “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.” Approval of an 8 percent rate increase for customers of Arizona’s largest utility, largely to cover the costs of expanding its grid despite the availability of cheaper options. The gutting of the utility’s plan to provide financial support for communities impacted by the closures of coal-fired power plants.

And all of that in just the past year.

Those decisions by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) have drawn an outcry from environmentalists and the state’s attorney general, spawned lawsuits, and prompted public campaigns by climate advocacy groups to hold the commission and Arizona Public Service Co., the state’s largest utility, accountable for continuing to use fossil fuels for electricity generation in Arizona.

In previous years, APS has invested tens of millions of dollars in influencing ACC elections.  But this November, the commission’s actions and the responses to them will play a pivotal role in determining who will be elected to the commission, which advocates say has the potential to dictate Arizona’s climate and renewable energy future more than any other vote for office holders in the state. 

“When it comes to mitigating climate change…the corporation commission plays a huge role in that,” said Emily Doerfler, a clean energy attorney with Western Resource Advocates who represents the climate-focused nonprofit in Arizona. 

Created in 1912 under the state’s constitution, the Arizona Corporation Commission regulates the state’s water and power utilities and determines how much customers can be charged, how much profit utilities can make, and how Arizona’s power grid is built and operated, along with other responsibilities. The state is one of 10 where the commissioners are elected and are separate from the state’s other branches of government, meaning only elections and lawsuits can hold them accountable.

“We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.” 

In 2022, Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats, giving them a supermajority. But three seats are up for election this year, setting the stage for a possible shift of the commission’s balance of power in one of Arizona’s most important, but often forgotten government entities. 

The election comes on the heels of the ACC approving two more gas-powered plants and yet another summer of record-breaking heat in Phoenix, with over 100 days straight of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in 339 confirmed heat-related deaths and another 336 cases under investigation. 

Eight candidates—three Democrats, three Republicans and two Greens—are on the ballot for the three spots. Only one candidate, Republican Lea Marquez Peterson, is running for reelection. 

In interviews and debates, Marquez Peterson and her Republican running mates, Rene Lopez and Rachel Walden, have defended the current commission’s approval of rate increases, citing the need to maintain grid stability, which they argue requires a “balanced” energy portfolio, including fossil fuels. 

“The reality is, as Arizona continues to grow, whether it’s residential growth or we have this long line of data centers and semiconductor industries that want to come to this state, we need to prepare for that energy demand, and that is why energy reliability needs to be our No. 1 factor,” Marquez Peterson said during a debate on Sept. 3.

The Republican candidates have also downplayed the energy sector’s role in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and argued that creating a mandate for renewables would raise rates further. About a quarter of the country’s emissions come from electric power, according to data from the EPA.

Democratic candidates Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathan Hill, and Joshua Polacheck have campaigned on allowing the free market to dictate Arizona’s energy sources, which they say would favor solar and other renewable energy sources leading to lower emissions and costs, and they have attacked the current commission for failing to protect Arizonans from rising energy costs and climate change. They say they will stick up for customers when utilities ask to increase rates and work to address climate change by expanding renewables in the state.

“Arizona is not known as an oil and gas capital of the country,” Hill, who is currently a mission planner at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility, said during the debate. “We are the sunshine capital of the entire country. There is no reason why Arizona should not be running entirely on solar.” 

Polacheck, a former foreign service officer with the US Department of State, said in an interview with Inside Climate News that the commission’s actions aren’t just affecting Arizonans today, but also future generations.

“The commissioners will be constructing the future of our state, and whether that state is going to be livable, whether it’s going to be a state where people can afford to raise their families and whether it’s a place where we can coexist with the environment,” he said. 

Just a few years ago, it seemed Arizona was close to setting a path to relying on an electricity mix made up entirely of renewable energy by 2050 thanks to a bipartisan plan from the ACC to reach that goal. 

But the plan ultimately unraveled. Since Republicans took four of the commission’s five seats in 2022, they have consistently approved new natural gas plants and are attempting to roll back what standards for renewable electricity still exist, though the state’s largest utilities have implemented their own clean energy goals. 

The commission’s decisions have prioritized “making it easier for utilities to continue expanding and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, which is historically much more profitable for them but much more expensive for ratepayers,” said Keriann Conroy, a research associate for the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-clean energy watchdog organization. “And of course, has a lot of climate and health and environmental impacts.”

The ACC has “abandoned” its duty to protect Arizonans” in favor of profit, says environmental lawyer Emily Doerfler.  “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission.”

This year, two major actions have dominated the headlines about the commission. The first was a decision approving a rate hike from APS that increased customers’ bills by roughly 8 percent, while also adding a surcharge for rooftop solar customers. That action also allowed utilities to build new power plants without first going through a rate hike case that allows public comment on the plan. The second decision expanded UNS Electric’s natural gas-powered Black Mountain Generating Station without an environmental review, which reversed 50 years of precedent and a vote from the commission’s Line Siting Committee that required the project to undergo such a review. 

The first action, climate groups argue, raised costs for customers to subsidize the utility’s continued consumption of fossil fuels despite its own studies finding that maintaining its coal-fired plants is uneconomical and that transitioning to renewables sooner would save it and ratepayers money. The ACC even went so far as to amend APS’s own plan, removing a $100 million fund the utility proposed for communities impacted by the coal-fired power plants eventually shutting down. 

The Black Mountain Generating Station decision led to legal action. Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former corporation commissioner herself, separately filed lawsuits appealing the commission’s decision.

UNS Electric plans to add four new gas-powered plants to its Black Mountain facility at 50 megawatts each, for a total of 200 MW. The utility argued that it was not under the jurisdiction of the commission or subject to an environmental review because each of the plants was under 100 MW. 

Arizona law requires a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility for power plants over 100 MW, and opponents of the ACC’s action say the new plants should be considered for their combined power output. The commission’s Line Siting Committee rejected the company’s argument in a 9-2 vote, arguing the commission had jurisdiction as the combined power of the plants at the single facility exceeded 100 MW. But the commissioners sided with the utility.

Doerfler, with Western Resource Advocates, said the ACC decision is just the latest example showing the commission has “abandoned” its constitutional duty to protect Arizonans, especially rural ones, “over and over and over again” to instead prioritize utility profits. “The people of Arizona do not matter to the corporation commission,” Doerfler said.

As essentially the state’s fourth branch of government, the ACC almost exclusively has the power to either end or continue Arizona’s reliance on fossil fuels, she said. That would include decisions like whether to mandate a quicker end to coal-fueled plants like APS’s Four Corners Power Plant.

“That means that the emissions that are coming from this coal plant in the next year are almost directly in the hands of the Arizona Corporation Commission,” Doerfler said. 

Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.

The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.

There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”

And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”

Trump’s refusal to compensate workers and contractors has been widely documented. In 2016, USA Today reported that Trump’s companies had been “cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.” In 2019, the Washington Post broke the story that employees at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briar­cliff Manor, New York, were forced to work without pay after they clocked out. It was called “side work.” The Trump Organization denied this happened.

In addition to the misleading substance of the ad, the spot features slow-mo, heroic-ish imagery of supposedly American workers. But in several instances, these are not Americans but overseas workers. A photo of a welder comes from a stock image taken by a photographer in the Netherlands and available (at a low price) on a Portuguese site. Footage of a delivery man on a bicycle traces back to a stock image company in Thailand and was also available on the Portuguese site. Video of a woman dressed in surgical garb—she’s a doctor or a nurse—was produced by a Ukrainian company. And a clip of a chef in a kitchen is from a video made by a Spanish production company.

The creators of the Right for America spot could not be bothered to find real Americans for the ad.

Right for America is funded by a small group of billionaires who are pals with Trump. Its biggest backers are Ike Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who together have kicked in at least $20 million. He’s a former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and has a reputation as an eccentric tycoon who eschews being photographed. Other major donors include venture capitalist Douglas Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital; Robert Book, a co-vice chair of the board of Axxes Capital; and trash hauling magnate Anthony Lomangino. The Perlmutters and Lomangino are members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club. The PAC is run by Sergio Gor, a friend of the Trump family once nicknamed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago.”

Right for America is just one of several billionaire-funded PACs that in the final weeks of the election are flooding TV, radio, and social media in swing states with ads to help Trump. According to Axios, it has booked about $40 million in ads through Election Day. And the New York Times reported that it has spent $500,000 to run this spot in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and $360,000 to air a Spanish-language version, mostly in Arizona.

This ad, which shows video of Trump returning to his feet after a gunman fired at him at a campaign rally in July, claims that “for too long no one in Washington has been looking out for” overtime workers and declares Trump is the one man who will. It’s rich that billionaires are spending so much money to convince voters that Trump is an advocate for hard-working toilers when he has shafted them as a businessman and as a president. Their pitch is as phony as the stock footage used to sell it.