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

Urban ducks and crows might offer us a connection to nature, but scientists have found wild birds that live near humans are more likely to harbor bacteria resistant to important antibiotics.

Antimicrobial resistance is largely caused by the overuse of drugs such as antibiotics among humans and livestock. The issue is of serious concern: According to data for 2019, almost 5 million deaths globally were associated with bacterial AMR, including 1.3 million directly caused by such resistance.

Researchers say species of wild birds that tend to turn up in urban settings are reservoirs for bacteria with the hallmarks of resistance to a host of drugs. “Basically what we’re seeing are genes that confer resistance to antimicrobials that would be used to treat human infections,” said Samuel Sheppard, co-author of the research from the Ineos Oxford Institute for antimicrobial research.

The team say their findings are important, as wild birds have the capacity to travel over considerable distances. Sheppard said a key concern was that these birds could pass antimicrobial-resistant bacteria to captive birds destined to be eaten by humans—such as those kept in poultry farms.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, Sheppard and colleagues report how they analyzed the genomes of bacteria found in 700 samples of bird poo from 30 wild bird species in Canada, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the United States.

The team looked specifically at the presence of different strains of Campylobacter jejuni—a type of bacteria that are ubiquitous in birds as a natural part of their gut microbiome. Such bacteria are a leading cause of human gastroenteritis, although antibiotics are generally only used in severe cases.

Sheppard added that, in general, each wild bird would be expected to harbor a single strain of C. jejuni, specific to that species. However, the team found wild birds that turn up in urban settings contain many more strains of C. jejuni than those that live away from humans.

What’s more, the strains found in urban-dwelling species contained about three times as many genes known to result in antimicrobial resistance, with these genes also associated with resistance to a broader range of antimicrobials.

The authors suggest that wild birds may pick up antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in a number of ways: gulls and crows, for example, are known to lurk at landfill sites, while ducks and geese may pick them up in rivers and lakes that are contaminated with human wastewater.

Dr Thomas Van Boeckel, anexpert in antimicrobial resistance at ETH Zürich who was not involved in the work, said the research was unusual as it focused on the impact of antimicrobial use by humans on animals. “What are the consequences of that for the birds? We don’t really know but it seems like we humans are responsible for this change,” he said.

Danna Gifford from the University of Manchester added the findings could have implications for human health. “While alarming, the risk of direct transmission of resistance from urban birds to humans is unclear. Poultry-to-human transmission, however, is well documented,” she said. “With urban development encroaching on agricultural land, increasing contact between urban birds and poultry raises significant concerns about indirect transmission through the food chain.”

Andrew Singer, of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said more samples were needed to ensure the results stood up, but that precautions could be taken.

“The most obvious place to start is to ensure birds do not congregate in our landfills, wastewater treatment plants and animal muck piles, where both pathogens and AMR are abundant,” he said. “Moreover, we must also eliminate the discharge of untreated sewage into our rivers, which exposes all river-using wildlife—and humans—to human-associated pathogens and AMR.”

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Field biologists tend to be a patient lot, often resigned to long days and weeks in the field and committed to experiments that take years to yield results. But even among that dogged crowd, Martin Wikelski stands out.

Back in 2001, sitting on a porch one evening in Panama, the German ornithologist had the germ of an idea for an “internet of animals,” a global system of sensor-wearing wildlife that would reveal the planet’s elusive, nonhuman worlds. He figured he could get it up and running by 2005. Nearly 20 years later, Wikelski may have finally succeeded—after surmounting roadblocks that range from bureaucratic mishaps to technical glitches to a geopolitical crisis. His space-based system, known as ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space), is now scheduled to launch, in its latest, satellite-based incarnation, on a private rocket sometime in 2025.

The underlying idea of the internet of animals is to tune into the planet’s hidden phenomena—the flight paths followed by sharp-shinned hawks, the precise fates befalling Arctic terns that die young, the exact landscape requirements of critically endangered saiga antelope—by attaching tiny, solar-powered tracking devices, some weighing less than a paperclip, to all kinds of organisms and even some inanimate objects (glaciers, ocean plastic debris). The inexpensive, globe-spanning system of animal tagging is meant to help scientists understand the precise drivers of global change, and much more, by tracking thousands of tagged animals from space and tying their experiences to the broader impacts facing whole populations or even species.

Wikelski, the director of the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, in Germany, said the prospect of having that data, and of “making people aware of the incredible beauty and richness of what’s happening out there,” has made the effort worthwhile, even urgent.

It’s also true, as he wrote in his recent book The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth, that he “had no clue how many pitfalls there would be…how many times when we desperately wanted to give up, because the whole process had become so exquisitely frustrating that we just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

In 2018, after years of working with designers, engineers, and government officials from multiple countries and continents, Wikelski’s team saw its ICARUS receiver launch aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station, where Russian cosmonauts attached it to their side of the orbiting lab. “We danced, cried, and hugged one another,” Wikelski wrote of the launch. “All the stress of nearly 20 years fell away.”

The internet of animals went live in March 2020, but before the year was out, mechanical issues on the Russian ISS module took the system down. Nearly a year passed before it was up and running again. By the spring of 2021, the system was finally humming along, receiving data from roughly 3,500 tagged animals around the world. But then, in the winter of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the West cut ties with Russia. ICARUS’s transmission of data abruptly halted.

After the ISS failure, Wikelski’s team set out to redesign the system to use satellite-based receivers, which had always been its long-term aim. In 2022, plans seemed almost set for an ICARUS receiver to orbit on the next GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite, a joint venture between NASA and the German space agency, scheduled to launch in 2028. But last-minute political haggling siphoned more than a third of the project’s German funding, leaving no money to include ICARUS. “We were totally devastated,” Wikelski recalled. He gave his project three months to find a solution or finally give up. “That’s when we scaled down and said, we need a CubeSat.”

And so beginning sometime next year, the project plans to launch ICARUS receivers on five relatively low-cost CubeSats—miniature satellites roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube and weighing only a couple of pounds—using private launch companies. Funded by the Max Planck Society, the system will cost roughly $1.6 million to launch and have annual operating expenses of around $160,000.

“The geopolitical aspect of this is pretty huge,” said Michael Wunder, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Colorado Denver who used the ISS tags to study the migration patterns of mountain plovers before the war in Ukraine cut off the research. Instead of involving government space agencies, the project’s new iteration keeps the scientists in control.

The new system allows for greater global coverage—the ISS receiver couldn’t communicate with tags at the planet’s highest latitudes—and Wikelski’s team has used the intervening years to shrink the tags by several grams and design new ways for animals to “wear” them, vastly expanding the number of species scientists can study. The team is currently upgrading 4,000 older tags to work with the new system. The tags provide hourly accounts of the animal’s energy expenditure; measure environmental factors like air pressure, altitude, temperature, and humidity; and even use AI to help interpret the animal’s behavior.

The trove of data “will open a lot of doors for researchers,” said Ashley Lohr, who coordinates North American projects for ICARUS through the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “How stressed was the animal? What were the environmental conditions when the animal was at this place at this time?”

Wunder’s lab group tagged 17 mountain plovers in Colorado in 2021. Native to the plains of the north-central United Staes, the species has declined by 80 percent in the past six decades. But the birds are hard to study because of their habitat and behavior. “They’re singing and vociferous but not in your face,” Wunder said, and in breeding season they like their space, living in densities of only about three birds per square kilometer. The plovers often occupy private ranchlands, which makes them hard to find without trespassing. And they breed in late March and April, while bird surveys, timed to count migratory songbirds, happen in May.

Wunder has long sought to understand whether mountain plovers follow distinct, structured migration patterns or whether birds from different areas mix together in winter flocks. He also wants to learn what drives the birds to migrate. “Are they moving away from something or toward something else?” he asks. He also hopes to determine exactly where the birds are running into trouble.

Before the ISS receiver went dark in 2022, the ICARUS tags revealed that the plovers didn’t follow fixed migration routes and that birds from around the country were mingling in the winter. When several transmitting birds died, Wunder was able to dispatch researchers to their locations and discover the cause of death—predation. The birds started returning to Colorado in February, and Wunder was eager to see which ones would come back—but then the war in Ukraine began. “We were cut off, there was no more information,” he said.

Ellen Aikens, a biologist at the University of Wyoming who did her postdoctoral research on animal migration at the Max Planck Institute, believes that ICARUS could serve as a “democratizing force” in ecology and biology. It’s a way to level the playing field, she says, so that “folks that have a smaller budget or are working on species that are a bit more obscure and there’s not as much funding behind can start to get the same kind of information, baseline info, about where those [animals] are going.”

In her lab, Aikens is studying golden eagles using a tag made by the German company e-obs. “It’s the gold standard of biologging in bird research, if you can afford it and your bird is big enough to carry the transformer”—like geese, storks, and eagles. A single e-obs tag costs more than $1,500 and works over a cellular network, meaning researchers must also pay the cost of data transmission for as long as the animal lives. “If you want to get a good sample size that will allow you to publish your research, that adds up really quickly,” Aikens said. “ICARUS tags are cheaper by an order of magnitude.”

Aikens believes that ICARUS will help transform the way scientists study animals. Our nonhuman neighbors “can take a pulse of the planet and be detectors of change and help us understand the health of the environment,” she said. “As [animals] move these vast distances, they can collect detailed environmental information that can better inform climate models and collect information in places that are difficult to monitor,” whether high in the sky, deep in the ocean, or under a thick layer of ice.

ICARUS tags are solar-powered, whereas some existing tagging systems run on batteries, which can die—ending the research on that individual or requiring recapture to change them out. Other tagging systems rely on animals passing by a signal tower. It works for certain animals, like birds and bats, but not for others. “Because ICARUS is satellite-powered, you don’t have to wait for your animal to go back on the grid and pass by a tower,” said Lohr. Instead, each time a satellite passes over an area, data from nearby tagged animals will be uploaded to Movebank, an open-access database.

Ultimately, researchers hope that ICARUS data can “help us pinpoint effective conservation strategies,” Aikens said. “It can help us identify pinch points on the landscape.” While this is already happening for some species, including North American ungulates like elk and pronghorn antelope, whose migrations researchers have tracked for years, for most of the planet’s species “we lack this data and this wide coverage of information, which makes these fine-scale interventions a lot harder to achieve. That’s a place that ICARUS can help fill in a lot of gaps.”

And if the internet of animals can zero in on specific issues—for instance, a bird species dying out because a particular insect it eats is being killed by a particular chemical being sprayed in an area—Wikelski believes such information could drive people to act. “People are willing to do something about it if they know that what they do is really helpful,” he said.

For now, Wikelski continues to practice patience. When I spoke to him in early July, he was dealing with the latest hurdle: satellite launch delays, including one caused by a payload issue and another caused by an ill-timed summer holiday that delayed authorization of the $30,000 payment needed to secure a launch reservation. “Our project is now too small to really be on everybody’s horizon,” he said. “Before, it was too large.”

Nevertheless, Wikelski was hopeful. His team was studying and perfecting the lowest-stress methods of tagging animals and even testing automatic tagging systems, like one for deer involving a salt lick and a tiny elastic band. He remained confident of ICARUS’s potential.

“One really important aspect we think is transformative in biology is the scaling up of tagging,” he said. “So you don’t have one animal but 50 or 100, or you do it across a continent.”

Over the next two years he plans to tag 9,000 animals in Europe, including blackbirds, storm thrushes, swifts, and sparrows in a study already underway. Roughly 7,000 of those 9,000 would die in the first year, he said, based on general patterns. “That means we are finally understanding where they disappear. Where are the death traps? These tags are so smart, they can tell us if a female is nesting and if the clutch disappears. So we can not only get information on where the adults are living and dying, but have the adults been successful in hatching or clutching? Is there a massive problem in a certain area? Then we can link individuals to populations and understand the drivers of change.”

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

After 18 months of record-breaking ocean temperatures, the planet’s reefs are in the middle of the most widespread heat-stress event on record.

Across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, latest figures from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch, shared with the Guardian, show 73 percent of the world’s corals have been hit with enough heat for them to begin bleaching.

Beginning in February 2023, this is the fourth global mass bleaching event—the second in 10 years, and the most widespread on record.

After seeing their beloved reefs struggling to survive, some coral scientists are now calling for a major rethink on how to protect reefs as temperatures climb even higher in the coming decades.

“We’re coming out of a couple of decades where we made predictions,” said Prof. Tracy Ainsworth, the vice-president of the International Coral Reef Society. “Now we are at a point where we hoped we would not be. Now we’re asking, what do we do now?”

In the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, three articles were published on Monday calling on the coral conservation and science community to have a collective rethink.

“I would call it soul searching,” said Prof. Tiffany Morrison, a co-author of one of the articles that is sharply critical of widespread programs, many with corporate backers, to grow corals in nurseries and then plant them out on reefs. “When everyone realized the scale of the climate impacts on coral reefs, the first instinct was to just do something and intervene because people were so distressed.”

In Florida and the Caribbean last year, many replanted corals died as record-breaking heat stress swept across the region. “We need a fundamental rethink,” said Prof. David Bellwood, a colleague of Morrison’s at James Cook University in Australia.

“Too much is at stake. At the moment, coral restoration is at best psychological relief and cosmetic conservation, and at worst a dangerous distraction from climate action.”

Coral reefs provide food for millions of people around the world. They also provide the raw material that eventually becomes much of the sand on beaches and protect coastlines from wave damage.

When corals sit in water that is too hot, they expel algae in their tissues that provide colour and much of their nutrients.

Dr. Derek Manzello, director of Coral Reef Watch, said the number of reefs affected by heat stress from the current global event was still rising and had “definitely led to most everyone involved with reef science and restoration having a hard think about future activities and best practices.”

The current global event has affected reefs in 70 countries and the full impact may never be fully understood.

The world’s biggest coral reef system—the Great Barrier Reef—has also likely been through its worst coral bleaching event, but government scientists may not know until next year how many corals died. Whether an individual coral survives bleaching depends on each species and the extremes and duration of heat.

In another scientific article, Michael Webster, a professor at New York University suggested a radical idea which, he said, would have been far too controversial for a scientific paper only 10 years ago.

Coral reefs exist across tropical waters around the world but are adapted to local conditions. Conservationists should consider introducing corals that have evolved in very hot regions to reefs where the current mix of corals are struggling to survive, Webster said: “It’s incredibly controversial and we might not ever go there, but we’re in a situation where we’re questioning if we will have reefs in many places. Is it now worth asking that question?”

Webster said coral reefs will have a better chance of surviving through the coming decades if they have a diversity of coral species: “Getting CO2 down has to be our end game, but we have centuries where coral systems like reefs will be in trouble.”

It is interventions like that mooted by Webster that Morrison is cautious about.

There’s a vast array of scientific solutions for coral reefs currently being worked on around the world, from whitening clouds to shade reefs to selective breeding of corals for increased heat tolerance.

“We are vesting too much money and hope into these speculative coral bioengineering and genetic engineering solutions,” Morrison said. “We don’t know if they’re scalable and, if they are, whether we can afford to scale them.”

Many interventions come up against a philosophical question. Who decides which species to save or modify, or which steps to take? Those decisions could dictate what reefs look like in the future—decisions made by humans, not by nature.

“There are very few people looking at unintended consequences and there’s no governance systems in place to manage that,” Morrison said. “But number one—we have to be mitigating fossil fuels.”

Members of the International Coral Reef Society wrote in May that scientists needed to “reconsider this challenge” of protecting reefs.

Because efforts to cut global greenhouse gas emissions were too slow, governments and communities needed to redouble efforts to reduce other stressors on corals, such as overfishing and local water pollution, the society said.

Tim McClanahan, a reef ecologist and director of marine science at the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society, admitted “people are freaking out” from the current bleaching.

He said there was little evidence coral restoration projects had restored reefs at scale and in places like Florida coral nurseries had been destroyed by heat. “I think they are ignoring past experiences and not recognizing the science,” he said.

“I’m concerned that a problem we have with NGOs is we’re not very good at admitting to our failures. I find there’s a tendency to act without consulting the literature.”

McClanahan, in a third article in Nature Climate Change, said predicting the future for coral reefs needs to be more sophisticated.

Rather than just including heat, modelling should account for how reefs react differently to heat stress depending on local conditions like the mix of coral species or how well protected they are. The prognosis for some reefs may not be quite so dire, he argued.

McClanahan has been working on reefs for 40 years and said he has seen them go from undisturbed wonders to shadows of their former selves.

“Yes, the reefs are screwed—in deep trouble. We’re experiencing very austere conditions for corals already,” he said. “In the ’90s I was in grief, but now I want to know how we deal with the situation that we’re in. We are not dealing with it very well and we have this fatalistic view.

“We should be freaking out. That’s not an unreasonable response, but we need to sit back and be a bit more intelligent”

This story, in the words of veterinarian Mércia Ângela, was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I had never seen a pangolin before I started working with them in Mozambique’s Gorongosa national park. They are the only mammal in the world covered with scales. I think they are so handsome—just seeing them makes me fall in love.

If you have never seen a pangolin, they have a cone-shaped head and snout, four short legs, small eyes, and a brilliant sense of smell. Their front claws are long to help them dig for food in the ground. They have a long sticky tongue but no teeth. When they feel threatened, they curl up in a ball to protect the parts of their bodies that do not have scales.

The pangolin in the main photo is a female called Boogli, who was rescued from traffickers and taken to our center as a baby. We took care of her until the time came to release her back into the wild. I can’t describe what it is like to hold a pangolin. It is unique. Usually they do not make noises—holding one in my hands only makes me want to protect them more.

When I arrive for work as a vet at our pangolin rehabilitation center, which opened in 2018, I take the pangolins for a walk in the field with my colleagues. We find places that they like, with lots of ants and termites to eat as well as water and mud. We stay with them while they eat, play, and reconnect with nature for two to three hours before we take them back to sleep, making sure that someone is aways watching them.

We do not put collars on them like dogs, but carry them on our laps to different areas. They are nocturnal so they sleep a lot during the day, especially when it is very hot. Sometimes, we have baby pangolins that need milk, so we will feed them and monitor their weight to make sure they are growing. We need to see them every day so they can get food and water.

By some estimates, pangolins are the most trafficked animal on the planet due to demand for their scales for traditional medicine in Asia. When one arrives, I do a physical examination to check if it is injured, sick or dehydrated. Those that have been trafficked, have often spent a long time in captivity in terrible conditions, where they have been mistreated and tied up. Once they have recovered, they are released back into the wild—but that is not always immediate.

We have a team of rangers who work to combat poaching in Gorongosa. It is normal to have this issue in a conservation area with lots of fauna, especially in a country where there is hunger and unemployment—people who do not have work end up getting involved in illegal activities such as poaching.

My training in veterinary medicine lasted five years. After I graduated from Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, the capital here in Mozambique, I was lucky enough to start my internship at the pangolin rehabilitation center, which began operating fully in 2019. That is how I fell in love with them, after I had the opportunity to see them for the first time. I spend nearly all of my time here at the park.

I would like to say to the public, especially young people here in Mozambique, that pangolins are very important animals. They play a crucial role in the balance of ecosystems; they need to be protected. By being there to take care of them, I am giving hope that, despite all the threats they face and all the evil things they experience, it is possible for them to return to nature and live freely.

Even before the Supreme Court ruled late last month in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a lawsuit over a herring fishing regulation, Meredith Moore knew the case was never really about fish. Moore, the director of the fish conservation program at the nonprofit environmental group Ocean Conservancy, instead saw the case as a “Trojan horse” that would weaken public agencies’ regulatory power across the board and unleash a wave of lawsuits aimed at unraveling environmental protections. “This is an opportunity for a free-for-all,” she says.

As Moore had feared, when it came time for the Court to deliver its June 28 decision on Loper Bright (which it had merged with a near-identical case, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce), the conservative majority overturned a decades-old legal precedent known as “Chevron deference.” Named after a 1984 Supreme Court case involving the oil giant, the doctrine was one of the most cited legal precedents ever. For 40 years, it instructed judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of a law—say, the Clean Water Act, Social Security Act, Affordable Care Act—when that law was unclear. Now, thanks to the pair of lawsuits (and the anti-regulatory interests like Charles Koch, who backed them), the power to determine the “best” reading of ambiguous statutes now falls to judges, not agency officials.

The decision, many legal experts warn, will curtail federal agencies’ ability to regulate everything from tax policy to reproductive rights and the environment, and is likely to be one of the court’s most significant actions in recent history—on par with decisions that overturned the right to abortion and ended affirmative action.

While it’s clear that the decision will be extraordinarily broad (which I’ve written about here and here), the specific, concrete details about its impact are less obvious. What will the ruling mean, for instance, for herring? Or other fish we eat? Or any of the more than 1,000 threatened and endangered species in the US?

Let’s start with herring. The regulation that sparked Relentless and Loper Bright required herring fishermen to pay for boat observers to monitor their catches—around $700 per trip—a practice intended to document what species are caught and prevent overfishing under the Magnuson–Stevens Act. While the Supreme Court took up the case, it only agreed to address Chevron deference, putting the fate of the fishing regulation in the hands of lower courts.

But beyond that single rule, Moore worries about federal efforts to manage fisheries in all sorts of other ways. Under the Magnuson–Stevens Act, the primary law governing US fisheries, she explains, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sets catch limits for various types of fish. If a population becomes overfished, the agency creates plans to rebuild them. In the last nearly 25 years, the agency says it’s helped recover 50 fish stocks, including populations of bocaccio (a type of rockfish), Snohomish coho salmon, and Pacific Ocean perch. But now, if the agency’s regulations are challenged in court, it will be up to a judge, rather than NOAA officials, to identify the most suitable application of laws like the Magnuson–Stevens Act—a change Moore worries will make it harder for NOAA to keep US fisheries operating sustainably.

Many other regulations may also be at risk. According to Democracy Forward, a nonprofit public policy research organization tracking lower-court citations of Loper Bright and Relentless, there have been at least 40 references to the court’s Chevron ruling as of mid-July, including in filings in 19 different cases and opinions from 11 courts. These citations involve many areas of the law, from gas appliance energy standards, Title IX, abortion, airline fees, anti-discrimination provisions in health care, and more. “By and large, these cases are being used aggressively to seek to stop regulations and programs that benefit the American people,” said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward. In one lawsuit, Massachusetts Lobstermen Association v. National Marine Fisheries Service, lawyers representing lobster fishermen referenced the Supreme Court’s Chevron ruling as part of their fight against a federal regulation intended to protect North Atlantic right whales. (Read more about this battle here.)

But not every environmental advocate sees the overturning of Chevron deference as a disaster for plants and animals. Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that has sued the federal government many times for not doing enough to protect imperiled wildlife, told me that he expects the decision to yield a “mixed bag” of lawsuits that will take years to play out. But he also sees it as an opportunity to strengthen certain environmental protections.

For instance, Hartl argues, the Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t always gone far enough to protect at-risk species as required by the Endangered Species Act. The agency has failed to follow its own species recovery plans, he argues, often proposing to delist species too soon. And it has never fully grappled with a key definition in the ESA: what it means for a species to be at risk of extinction within “a significant portion” of its “range”—whether that means an animal’s current range, historic range, or something else. The agency’s “unambitious” and “piecemeal” approach to recovery, as the Center for Biological Diversity has described it, hurts creatures like wolves and grizzly bears that once roamed large swaths of the country. (When reached by email, a spokesperson with the Fish and Wildlife Service pointed me to the Department of Interior, which declined to comment on its alleged shortcomings or the impacts of overturning Chevron broadly.)

Similarly, the wording of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, Hartl points out, suggests a need to steward the environment for “succeeding generations.” With this language, he argues, “NEPA creates almost an intergenerational responsibility to the environment,” and no administration has ever really capitalized on that mandate. Now, without Chevron, he argues, a federal judge might agree that federal agencies ought to do more to protect the environment under the law.

“If you have agencies constantly not meeting their mandates, and sort of falling short,” Hartl says, “Chevron is mostly a shield for them that has allowed them to perpetuate bad behavior.”

Now that Chevron is gone, Hartl says, “there actually are opportunities to make things better.” (The Center for Biological Diversity, he told me, is already planning to “retool” some of its ongoing lawsuits and introduce new ones to take advantage of the ruling.) Hartl argues that if Donald Trump wins reelection, his agencies will have “a hell of a lot less power” when it comes to regulations. “Do you want them having all this deference? I don’t.”

But overall, most of the experts I’ve spoken to about Chevron deference did not see a silver lining for wild plants and animals (or for environmental protections as a whole). Holly Doremus, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, told me via email that an optimistic view like the Center for Biological Diversity’s may be trying to “see the best in a bad situation.” In the short run, she expects federal courts to follow the Supreme Court’s lead and “be much more skeptical” of agency actions they see as overstepping the law rather than those seen as not going far enough for, say, endangered species protection. As Vermont Law School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau explains, lower courts often take their cues from the Supreme Court, which has signaled a clear desire to narrow environmental laws and reign in agency authority.

Other experts noted that the loss of Chevron will likely prompt groups on all sides of the political spectrum to judge-shop in specific courts to challenge rules they dislike. This could lead to a “lack of coherence” in which agency regulations are overturned or upheld, NRDC lawyer David Doniger, who argued the original 1984 Chevron case before the Supreme Court, told me ahead of the recent ruling. (It’s no secret, for instance, that a disproportionate number of lawsuits against Biden administration regulations are filed in the Amarillo Division of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where conservative, Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk sits.)

“I think you could have maybe a few wins here and there,” the Ocean Conservancy’s Moore says. “But I’m more concerned about the instability, uncertainty, and patchwork nature of what regulations will look like if they’re all able to be sued in different ways in different places.”

Echoing both Moore and Doremus, Parenteau said that while environmental advocates may see some victories in court, he believes they’re up against a “stacked deck” under this new system, in part because of the signals coming from the Supreme Court and industry’s near-unlimited resources to sue the government.

“The opponents of environmental regulation have the upper hand, there is no question about it,” he says.” And they’re going to win and win and win. And environmental advocates are just going to have to scrape and claw and try to win a few. That’s the world we’re in.”

Enlarge / The intrepid three-legged lion Jacob and his brother Tibu prepare for a hunt. (credit: Alexander Braczkowski)

On February 4, scientists monitoring lion populations in Uganda captured nighttime thermal drone footage of two lions—brothers dubbed Jacob and Tibu by the Uganda Wildlife Authority—swimming across the predator-infested Kazinga Channel connecting two lakes, most likely to find mates. While there have been prior reports of lions swimming short distances, Jacob and Tibu covered about 1.5 kilometers (nearly one mile)—the longest swim yet recorded, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"The fact that [Jacob] and his brother Tibu have managed to survive as long as they have in a national park that has experienced significant human pressures and high poaching rates is a feat in itself—our science has shown this population has nearly halved in just five years," said co-author Alexander Braczkowski of Griffith University, who has been working with the government of Uganda since 2017 to monitor the lion population in the area. "His swim, across a channel filled with high densities of hippos and crocodiles, is a record-breaker and is a truly amazing show of resilience in the face of such risk.”

Jacob and Tibu's impressive feat is likely the result of increased pressure from human encroachment, according to Braczkowski. He co-authored a 2020 paper proposing a novel census technique that could be used more broadly as an early warning of lion declines. Their method revealed a worrying movement parameter for both male and female lions in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park, where the home range increased to 3.27 km (a 400 percent increase) for males and 2.22 km (a 100 percent increase) for females—likely a response to systematic prey depletion due to poaching, for example. And the sex ratio was dangerously skewed: one male to 0.75 females, a highly unusual occurrence.

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In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.”

The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that was once the largest building on campus. It was here, 102 years earlier, that Albert Einstein described his theory of relativity to a packed house.

The 200 students enrolled in Philosophy 385—about as many as in all other Princeton philosophy classes combined—were acutely aware, per the course syllabus, that they were his final crop:

This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. NOTE: This will be the last time I teach this course before my retirement from Princeton University.

In May, following a two-day farewell conference, the now-78-year-old Australian bade farewell to Princeton and, with a perceptible measure of good riddance, the United States, his second home for more than a quarter-century. For his final class, Singer had prepared a PowerPoint looking back on his years at Princeton—and America.

It’s striking to consider the extent to which the United States has been shaped by Singer’s version of utilitarianism—the belief that actions are ethical insomuch as they increase our collective pleasure and limit our collective suffering. His addition to this ancient idea is simple and profound: Singer believes that all pain experienced by sentient beings counts the same.

The logical extensions of his intellectual positions have on occasion caused great controversy, as when Singer’s belief that newborns lack sentience led him to assert that in extreme cases, parents should have the right to end the life of a severely disabled infant. In response, a disability rights organization dubbed him “the most dangerous man on earth.” Generally speaking, Singer sees few ideas as off-limits. He recently helped launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which last fall published an article on whether zoophilia is morally permissible.

Whatever one might think of Singer’s ideas, there’s no doubt they’ve had a great deal of impact. Interest-based utilitarianism is at the root of Singer’s path-breaking advocacy for animal rights and, somewhat controversially, of effective altruism, the charitable principle famously espoused by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud last year. Earlier this year, along with Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Singer launched a podcast exploring how to live an ethical, meaningful life.

Perhaps most profoundly, his philosophy flicks at the core of America’s democratic project. While the Founding Fathers were most influenced by John Locke, it was John Stuart Mill—a utilitarian—whose ideas shaped the evolution of constitutional liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. As we face one of the most fraught political periods in recent memory, it’s sobering to hear Singer’s take on America’s shortcomings—and his assessment of what’s to come.

Singer first arrived in the US in 1973, shortly after finishing his graduate work at Oxford University. He was accompanied by his wife, Renata, who’d recently given birth to their first child. The couple had planned to return to Australia to raise their daughter but wanted to spend some time in the States first. “Obviously, everything in America is a big presence growing up in Australia,” Singer told me during one of several interviews.

On the advice of philosopher Derek Parfit, another influential philosopher of Singer’s generation, Singer accepted a visiting professorship at New York University and settled into university housing on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

The NYU position came with the possibility of a two-year extension, but the college was then on the verge of bankruptcy. It ultimately sold off its uptown campus, and the administrators informed Singer that they wouldn’t renew his contract. “We were reasonably okay with that,” he recalls. “We didn’t want our children to grow up as Americans, really.” He quickly landed an appointment at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

With time to kill between jobs, he spent the fall of 1974 teaching a continuing education course. In it, he presented a draft of a manuscript based on an essay he’d published the year before in the New York Review of Books. The piece was inspired in part by Singer’s decision, four years earlier on Earth Day, to stop eating meat. It was persuasive enough to convince the Review’s founder and editor, Robert Silvers, to become a vegetarian.

Published in 1975 with the same title, Animal Liberation is almost inarguably the most important book in the history of animal rights. It has remained in print for 50 years and been read by almost everyone in the field. Cheryl Leahy read it at age 13, after a classmate accused her in the lunchroom of eating the “decomposing flesh of a tortured animal.”

Today, Leahy is executive director of Animal Outlook, a nonprofit focused on animal protection, and has spent her 20-year career as an attorney advocating for the interests of nonhuman beings. “Animal Liberation lit the fire for me,” she told me. “It probably did for countless people. You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

Thanks in part to Singer, vegetarianism in the United States has increased over the years. In 1994, barely 1 percent of Americans self-identified as vegetarian or vegan. Recent surveys put the rate at 5 to 8 percent. Yet with population growth, the US public now consumes more meat than ever, and the vast majority of factory-farmed animals still live short, miserable lives. Even “cage-free” hens, Singer laments, are generally crowded into giant sheds with thousands of birds. “I’m disappointed [the animal welfare movement] hasn’t gone further,” he told the class I attended.

Some 25 years after the couple’s NYU adventure, Singer received an invitation to teach at Princeton. Their kids were grown, and he and Renata had been contemplating a move anyway. “In fact,” he says, “we’d been talking about going to a Third World country for something quite different.” But a friend, animal rights activist Henry Spira, argued that Singer had a greater obligation: “Henry said to me at some stage, ‘You ought to come over the United States because it’s a much bigger pond and you’ll have a much bigger impact. The United States needs your ideas just as much as Australia, but it’s 15 times bigger and you’ll have more of a world influence.’” The offer proved “just a bit too tempting to turn down.”

Back in the lecture hall, with Australian understatement, Singer informed his students that his 1999 hiring “caused something of a stir.” Indeed, the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that no academic appointment had caused such controversy since 1940, when City College had tried to hire atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Editorial writers, the story noted, “have compared Mr. Singer’s hiring to that of a Nazi.” Then-Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alum and supporter, threatened to stop donating to the university if the appointment stood. Protesters blocked the entrance to Nassau Hall, the administration building, because of Singer’s support of euthanasia in extreme circumstances. But Princeton President Harold Shapiro stood behind Singer, and the hubbub subsided.

Given all of this year’s campus upheaval over Israel’s activities in Gaza, Singer’s hiring kerfuffle seems almost quaint today. I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no. During the lecture, when Singer spoke proudly of his role in launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, no one seemed to bat an eye.

Near the end of his lecture, Singer addressed an elephant in the room—Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who’d just been convicted of defrauding customers and investors out of at least $10 billion. Bankman-Fried also ranked among the most prominent champions of effective altruism (EA), a movement inspired in significant part by Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”   

EA proponents generally advocate for using data and reason to maximize the future benefits of any charitable action. In his paper, Singer argued that the failure of wealthy people to contribute to humanitarian causes was akin to failing to help a child drowning in a shallow pond. He was referring in this case to a famine afflicting Bangladeshi war refugees, but the argument applied generally.

In 2009, inspired by Singer’s work, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched an organization, Giving What We Can, framed around their pledge to donate at least a tenth of their income to effective charities. The next year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited fellow billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a vow to dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. When a group of 17 billionaires signed the pledge in late 2010, the press release included a statement from Singer.

Although their causes and motivations have been questioned, the notion that rich people ought to be more altruistic—the “A” in EA—is not a matter of serious dispute. It’s the “E” where things get complicated.

In 2013, Singer co-founded The Life You Can Save, an organization named after one of his books that attempts to quantify and maximize charitable impact, often in terms of quality-adjusted life years, a metric borrowed from the public health universe. In practical terms, this usually means steering money to causes that benefit developing nations as opposed to, say, your elementary school PTA.

At the heart of MacAskill’s own 2016 book, Doing Good Better, is the idea that a dollar spent by a citizen of a rich country could do 100 times more good if spent in an impoverished nation. This notion is not particularly controversial either, at least not among ethicists, who by and large would agree that giving to the opera is neither charitable nor effective by any meaningful definition of the words.

But then there’s “longtermism,” an EA offshoot that prioritizes the elimination of existential risks such as biological and nuclear weapons, climate change, and malicious AIs, which longtermers say could wreak havoc on future humans or other forms of life—which could include (non-malicious) sentient AIs. In a more recent book, What We Owe the Future, MacAskill casts protecting the denizens of the distant future as the moral imperative of our time—the ultimate cause.

This view is highly controversial. The New School for Social Research philosophy professor Alice Crary, a prominent critic, calls longtermism “toxic” because of the stark utilitarian tradeoff it embraces. The focus on “existential risk,” she writes, “marks a dramatic shift from the concern with present and near-term suffering that is the hallmark of their effective altruist progenitors.”

Singer distances himself from strong longtermism in part for this reason. He’s also skeptical of the longtermers’ more speculative projects, like aiming to protect the interests of sentient nonhumans. Utilitarians, Singer says, are split on whether hypothetical beings deserve the same consideration as actual humans. “That I still regard as one of the most difficult and baffling issues in ethical theory,” he says.

He’s also doubtful that we can meaningfully adjust our actions to do good in the distant future and is thus careful to distinguish between the dangers from asteroids and viruses—“where we can significantly reduce risks for modest amounts of money”—and more abstract projects. As for general artificial intelligence, AI that broadly matches or surpasses human capabilities, “we don’t know whether that will come, we don’t when it is coming, and we don’t really know what we could do now that would reduce that risk.”

But Singer is more tolerant of the notion of pursuing a high income with the intent to donate a sizable portion to charity. The EA community calls this “earning to give,” and it’s a significant part of the work of effective altruist Benjamin Todd’s organization 80,000 Hours (the average person’s work longevity); its disciples included Bankman-Fried, who claimed he aspired to accumulate near-infinite wealth so he could redistribute it.

For his students, Singer put up a slide reading, “Do Good But Don’t Be Sketchy!” explaining how Bankman-Fried had told journalist Kelsey Piper he’d never intended to commit fraud, and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” A father of three and grandfather of four, Singer then lowered his voice. “Well, be warned,” he said. “Don’t let life creep up on you.”

But Singer’s admonition begs the question of whether EA can be used to justify unethical behavior. It certainly seem to rationalize the existence and inform the ethos of elite colleges like Princeton, an institution that admits more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent, and where graduates’ most common career path is “business.”

EA arguably relieves such institutions of the pressure to embrace a more socioeconomically diverse group of students and encourage them toward public-interest careers. “EA makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” Crary says. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

Singer might not go that far, but he was willing to sign on as an unpaid adviser (in name only) to Class Action, a nonprofit I co-founded that advocates against inequitable admissions policies at so-called elite colleges and the funneling of graduates into investment banking and management consulting careers.

To his students, Singer said: “You will get asked to donate to various charities after you graduate, and one of them might be to improve education here at Princeton. The question can be raised: Is this the most effective thing that you can do with your donations?”

He acknowledged that they might feel a debt to their alma mater: “But I think you should think of your charitable donations like that in a different pocket from donations where you want to really do the most good in the world.”

While Singer is best known for his influence on animal rights and effective altruism, his Oxford graduate thesis, later published as his first book, focused on the ethics of civil disobedience in democracies. In it, he argues that our voluntary participation in a democratic process obligates us to accept its outcome.

“After the election,” Singer wrote in 1973—amid the Watergate scandal that would lead to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation—“it is too late to say that one never accepted its validity.” It’s thus only natural that he has followed American politics closely, and critically, ever since the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush president in 2000, shortly after Singer arrived at Princeton. Now, like much of America, he’s anxious about November.

“One of the things that’s absurd about American politics is first-past-the-post voting,” Singer says, citing the practice of allowing voters to select only one candidate and awarding the seat to whomever has the most votes—as opposed to alternative voting systems that are used around the world and widely perceived as fairer. “The reason that Bush was president instead of [Al] Gore was Ralph Nader running for the Greens,” he says. “That was terrible of him, and I’ve never forgiven him, but it also shows how stupid this voting system is. [Donald] Trump never would have gotten the nomination in 2016 if they’d used ranked-choice voting.”

“Australia does elections better than America,” he adds, citing a litany of practices he views as beneficial. “We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays, not a weekday. We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries—we don’t have politicians do it. We don’t have primaries. We have parliamentary parties elect their leaders, which means they’ve been through the scrutiny of their colleagues, so it’s a much better proving ground for who’s going to be a good leader.”

He holds special enmity for the Electoral College. “Hillary [Clinton] got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, so she should have been president,” Singer says. “And the gerrymandered electorates are disgraceful as well.”

Whatever his debt to the United States and its institutions, Singer’s national allegiance is clear. “I’ve never thought of myself as an American,” he says, as we talk about how difficult it is for his countrymen to accept the insanity of US politics. “They are astounded about the gun laws,” he says. “Australia has very tough gun laws, and they were brought in by a conservative prime minister, John Howard. It’s just incredible to me that America cannot see how obviously terrible it is to have guns available to everybody.”

The critiques continue. “America lacks universal health care coverage, which is something that we Australians all take for granted,” Singer says. “This is perhaps more controversial, but we generally don’t think that it’s a good idea to have a Supreme Court that decides issues like abortion.”

Australians, he adds, have difficulty grappling with the outsize sway of money over politics and policy here. “It’s not that money has no influence in Australia,” he explains, “but it doesn’t have the same kind of influence on individual elected representatives, because what matters is the political party—and individual candidates for Parliament don’t have to raise their own money.”

Prior to Trump’s recent criminal conviction, over a vegan lunch at a Princeton dining hall, I ask Singer what he sees in America’s future. “You think philosophers have crystal balls, do you?” he asks with a smile. I counter that I do not, but that readers would be keenly interested in an astute traveler’s observations of our embattled democratic order. “You’re Alexis de Tocqueville in this story,” I say.

“I hope I can live up to it.”

He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Until recently, I thought that Trump was not going to be electable. I thought he had this 40 percent of hardcore supporters, but that wasn’t going to be enough. But obviously, the polls that have come out recently have been more scary than that. I wish there were a strong Democrat running for office who is not in his 80s, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.”

Trump’s behavior has polarized the nation and “encouraged this idea that we have our own set of facts,” he emphasizes. “Bush did some of that, too. I think Karl Rove said something like, ‘You’re living in the reality world.’ But Trump has made it so much worse, talking about the fake news stuff just to get people to believe that there were no facts you can agree on. I think that’s been very damaging to democracy.” (Rove has denied that he was the source of the quote in question, which the New York Times Magazine attributed to an anonymous “senior adviser to Bush.”)

Most utilitarians believe that engaging with ideas—even patently false ones—generally serves the greater good, but on the eve of the first presidential debate, which was disastrous for President Joe Biden, Singer said he thought Trump might be the rare exception. Debating Trump, he told me in an email, “would be unethical if this would-be despot, crazy person were not the overwhelmingly likely nominee of one of America’s two major political parties.”

Yet based purely on a political-utilitarian calculus, he figures Biden didn’t have much choice. “I think it would look weak to refuse to debate him,” Singer said. “Trump would make a lot of hay with that. He would say, ‘He’s old and senile and can’t do it.’”

After the debate, Singer wrote on X that “Biden should announce that at the Democratic Convention he will release his delegates to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump.” In a follow-up email, he cited the “terrible blot” of Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign on Nader’s own career as a consumer advocate and the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court while Democrats controlled the Senate, which resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade “and now is denying the EPA the power to issue essential environmental regulations.”

“Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean for the US and the world?” he said.

He fears what a second Trump term might portend. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s fossil-fuel cheerleading and hostility toward climate action. “He’s not going to do what needs to be done, and that’s a huge problem that dwarfs the others. Another four years,” Singer told me, “then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

The demise of the founders’ grand experiment isn’t far behind on his worry list: “Would it be the end of American democracy? Probably not is my guess, but there’s a much greater chance of it being the end of American democracy if Trump is elected than if he’s defeated. I wouldn’t like to take that risk. And the fact that he would not support Ukraine against his friend [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, whom he understands so well, is also a big worry. Because that’s not just about the plight of Ukraine, it’s about the rule of law in international affairs.”

His concern extends to the Gaza situation. “Trump is such a loose cannon” that he’s difficult to predict, Singer says. “But given the idea that he’s all about putting America’s interests first and he doesn’t seem to show that he cares much about other people, he may well believe that it’s in America’s interest for the Netanyahu government to do as it wishes. And that may be much worse for the Palestinian people than if Biden, who is at least trying to put some pressure on the Netanyahu government to have a ceasefire, remains in office.”

Back in McCosh Hall, the hour drew to a close—and with it Singer’s Princeton career.    

After nearly a quarter-century, there was a palpable sense he’d had enough. His farewell slide to his last-ever Practical Ethics class—which was followed by a rousing standing ovation from the students—had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy or politics or even ethics.

It was a photo of Singer in a wetsuit, surfboard in hand, practicing a hobby he took up in his 50s. “Bye,” it said. “I’ve gone surfing.”

In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.”

The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that was once the largest building on campus. It was here, 102 years earlier, that Albert Einstein described his theory of relativity to a packed house.

The 200 students enrolled in Philosophy 385—about as many as in all other Princeton philosophy classes combined—were acutely aware, per the course syllabus, that they were his final crop:

This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. NOTE: This will be the last time I teach this course before my retirement from Princeton University.

In May, following a two-day farewell conference, the now-78-year-old Australian bade farewell to Princeton and, with a perceptible measure of good riddance, the United States, his second home for more than a quarter-century. For his final class, Singer had prepared a PowerPoint looking back on his years at Princeton—and America.

It’s striking to consider the extent to which the United States has been shaped by Singer’s version of utilitarianism—the belief that actions are ethical insomuch as they increase our collective pleasure and limit our collective suffering. His addition to this ancient idea is simple and profound: Singer believes that all pain experienced by sentient beings counts the same.

The logical extensions of his intellectual positions have on occasion caused great controversy, as when Singer’s belief that newborns lack sentience led him to assert that in extreme cases, parents should have the right to end the life of a severely disabled infant. In response, a disability rights organization dubbed him “the most dangerous man on earth.” Generally speaking, Singer sees few ideas as off-limits. He recently helped launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which last fall published an article on whether zoophilia is morally permissible.

Whatever one might think of Singer’s ideas, there’s no doubt they’ve had a great deal of impact. Interest-based utilitarianism is at the root of Singer’s path-breaking advocacy for animal rights and, somewhat controversially, of effective altruism, the charitable principle famously espoused by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud last year. Earlier this year, along with Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Singer launched a podcast exploring how to live an ethical, meaningful life.

Perhaps most profoundly, his philosophy flicks at the core of America’s democratic project. While the Founding Fathers were most influenced by John Locke, it was John Stuart Mill—a utilitarian—whose ideas shaped the evolution of constitutional liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. As we face one of the most fraught political periods in recent memory, it’s sobering to hear Singer’s take on America’s shortcomings—and his assessment of what’s to come.

Singer first arrived in the US in 1973, shortly after finishing his graduate work at Oxford University. He was accompanied by his wife, Renata, who’d recently given birth to their first child. The couple had planned to return to Australia to raise their daughter but wanted to spend some time in the States first. “Obviously, everything in America is a big presence growing up in Australia,” Singer told me during one of several interviews.

On the advice of philosopher Derek Parfit, another influential philosopher of Singer’s generation, Singer accepted a visiting professorship at New York University and settled into university housing on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

The NYU position came with the possibility of a two-year extension, but the college was then on the verge of bankruptcy. It ultimately sold off its uptown campus, and the administrators informed Singer that they wouldn’t renew his contract. “We were reasonably okay with that,” he recalls. “We didn’t want our children to grow up as Americans, really.” He quickly landed an appointment at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

With time to kill between jobs, he spent the fall of 1974 teaching a continuing education course. In it, he presented a draft of a manuscript based on an essay he’d published the year before in the New York Review of Books. The piece was inspired in part by Singer’s decision, four years earlier on Earth Day, to stop eating meat. It was persuasive enough to convince the Review’s founder and editor, Robert Silvers, to become a vegetarian.

Published in 1975 with the same title, Animal Liberation is almost inarguably the most important book in the history of animal rights. It has remained in print for 50 years and been read by almost everyone in the field. Cheryl Leahy read it at age 13, after a classmate accused her in the lunchroom of eating the “decomposing flesh of a tortured animal.”

Today, Leahy is executive director of Animal Outlook, a nonprofit focused on animal protection, and has spent her 20-year career as an attorney advocating for the interests of nonhuman beings. “Animal Liberation lit the fire for me,” she told me. “It probably did for countless people. You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

Thanks in part to Singer, vegetarianism in the United States has increased over the years. In 1994, barely 1 percent of Americans self-identified as vegetarian or vegan. Recent surveys put the rate at 5 to 8 percent. Yet with population growth, the US public now consumes more meat than ever, and the vast majority of factory-farmed animals still live short, miserable lives. Even “cage-free” hens, Singer laments, are generally crowded into giant sheds with thousands of birds. “I’m disappointed [the animal welfare movement] hasn’t gone further,” he told the class I attended.

Some 25 years after the couple’s NYU adventure, Singer received an invitation to teach at Princeton. Their kids were grown, and he and Renata had been contemplating a move anyway. “In fact,” he says, “we’d been talking about going to a Third World country for something quite different.” But a friend, animal rights activist Henry Spira, argued that Singer had a greater obligation: “Henry said to me at some stage, ‘You ought to come over the United States because it’s a much bigger pond and you’ll have a much bigger impact. The United States needs your ideas just as much as Australia, but it’s 15 times bigger and you’ll have more of a world influence.’” The offer proved “just a bit too tempting to turn down.”

Back in the lecture hall, with Australian understatement, Singer informed his students that his 1999 hiring “caused something of a stir.” Indeed, the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that no academic appointment had caused such controversy since 1940, when City College had tried to hire atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Editorial writers, the story noted, “have compared Mr. Singer’s hiring to that of a Nazi.” Then-Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alum and supporter, threatened to stop donating to the university if the appointment stood. Protesters blocked the entrance to Nassau Hall, the administration building, because of Singer’s support of euthanasia in extreme circumstances. But Princeton President Harold Shapiro stood behind Singer, and the hubbub subsided.

Given all of this year’s campus upheaval over Israel’s activities in Gaza, Singer’s hiring kerfuffle seems almost quaint today. I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no. During the lecture, when Singer spoke proudly of his role in launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, no one seemed to bat an eye.

Near the end of his lecture, Singer addressed an elephant in the room—Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who’d just been convicted of defrauding customers and investors out of at least $10 billion. Bankman-Fried also ranked among the most prominent champions of effective altruism (EA), a movement inspired in significant part by Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”   

EA proponents generally advocate for using data and reason to maximize the future benefits of any charitable action. In his paper, Singer argued that the failure of wealthy people to contribute to humanitarian causes was akin to failing to help a child drowning in a shallow pond. He was referring in this case to a famine afflicting Bangladeshi war refugees, but the argument applied generally.

In 2009, inspired by Singer’s work, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched an organization, Giving What We Can, framed around their pledge to donate at least a tenth of their income to effective charities. The next year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited fellow billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a vow to dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. When a group of 17 billionaires signed the pledge in late 2010, the press release included a statement from Singer.

Although their causes and motivations have been questioned, the notion that rich people ought to be more altruistic—the “A” in EA—is not a matter of serious dispute. It’s the “E” where things get complicated.

In 2013, Singer co-founded The Life You Can Save, an organization named after one of his books that attempts to quantify and maximize charitable impact, often in terms of quality-adjusted life years, a metric borrowed from the public health universe. In practical terms, this usually means steering money to causes that benefit developing nations as opposed to, say, your elementary school PTA.

At the heart of MacAskill’s own 2016 book, Doing Good Better, is the idea that a dollar spent by a citizen of a rich country could do 100 times more good if spent in an impoverished nation. This notion is not particularly controversial either, at least not among ethicists, who by and large would agree that giving to the opera is neither charitable nor effective by any meaningful definition of the words.

But then there’s “longtermism,” an EA offshoot that prioritizes the elimination of existential risks such as biological and nuclear weapons, climate change, and malicious AIs, which longtermers say could wreak havoc on future humans or other forms of life—which could include (non-malicious) sentient AIs. In a more recent book, What We Owe the Future, MacAskill casts protecting the denizens of the distant future as the moral imperative of our time—the ultimate cause.

This view is highly controversial. The New School for Social Research philosophy professor Alice Crary, a prominent critic, calls longtermism “toxic” because of the stark utilitarian tradeoff it embraces. The focus on “existential risk,” she writes, “marks a dramatic shift from the concern with present and near-term suffering that is the hallmark of their effective altruist progenitors.”

Singer distances himself from strong longtermism in part for this reason. He’s also skeptical of the longtermers’ more speculative projects, like aiming to protect the interests of sentient nonhumans. Utilitarians, Singer says, are split on whether hypothetical beings deserve the same consideration as actual humans. “That I still regard as one of the most difficult and baffling issues in ethical theory,” he says.

He’s also doubtful that we can meaningfully adjust our actions to do good in the distant future and is thus careful to distinguish between the dangers from asteroids and viruses—“where we can significantly reduce risks for modest amounts of money”—and more abstract projects. As for general artificial intelligence, AI that broadly matches or surpasses human capabilities, “we don’t know whether that will come, we don’t when it is coming, and we don’t really know what we could do now that would reduce that risk.”

But Singer is more tolerant of the notion of pursuing a high income with the intent to donate a sizable portion to charity. The EA community calls this “earning to give,” and it’s a significant part of the work of effective altruist Benjamin Todd’s organization 80,000 Hours (the average person’s work longevity); its disciples included Bankman-Fried, who claimed he aspired to accumulate near-infinite wealth so he could redistribute it.

For his students, Singer put up a slide reading, “Do Good But Don’t Be Sketchy!” explaining how Bankman-Fried had told journalist Kelsey Piper he’d never intended to commit fraud, and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” A father of three and grandfather of four, Singer then lowered his voice. “Well, be warned,” he said. “Don’t let life creep up on you.”

But Singer’s admonition begs the question of whether EA can be used to justify unethical behavior. It certainly seem to rationalize the existence and inform the ethos of elite colleges like Princeton, an institution that admits more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent, and where graduates’ most common career path is “business.”

EA arguably relieves such institutions of the pressure to embrace a more socioeconomically diverse group of students and encourage them toward public-interest careers. “EA makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” Crary says. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

Singer might not go that far, but he was willing to sign on as an unpaid adviser (in name only) to Class Action, a nonprofit I co-founded that advocates against inequitable admissions policies at so-called elite colleges and the funneling of graduates into investment banking and management consulting careers.

To his students, Singer said: “You will get asked to donate to various charities after you graduate, and one of them might be to improve education here at Princeton. The question can be raised: Is this the most effective thing that you can do with your donations?”

He acknowledged that they might feel a debt to their alma mater: “But I think you should think of your charitable donations like that in a different pocket from donations where you want to really do the most good in the world.”

While Singer is best known for his influence on animal rights and effective altruism, his Oxford graduate thesis, later published as his first book, focused on the ethics of civil disobedience in democracies. In it, he argues that our voluntary participation in a democratic process obligates us to accept its outcome.

“After the election,” Singer wrote in 1973—amid the Watergate scandal that would lead to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation—“it is too late to say that one never accepted its validity.” It’s thus only natural that he has followed American politics closely, and critically, ever since the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush president in 2000, shortly after Singer arrived at Princeton. Now, like much of America, he’s anxious about November.

“One of the things that’s absurd about American politics is first-past-the-post voting,” Singer says, citing the practice of allowing voters to select only one candidate and awarding the seat to whomever has the most votes—as opposed to alternative voting systems that are used around the world and widely perceived as fairer. “The reason that Bush was president instead of [Al] Gore was Ralph Nader running for the Greens,” he says. “That was terrible of him, and I’ve never forgiven him, but it also shows how stupid this voting system is. [Donald] Trump never would have gotten the nomination in 2016 if they’d used ranked-choice voting.”

“Australia does elections better than America,” he adds, citing a litany of practices he views as beneficial. “We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays, not a weekday. We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries—we don’t have politicians do it. We don’t have primaries. We have parliamentary parties elect their leaders, which means they’ve been through the scrutiny of their colleagues, so it’s a much better proving ground for who’s going to be a good leader.”

He holds special enmity for the Electoral College. “Hillary [Clinton] got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, so she should have been president,” Singer says. “And the gerrymandered electorates are disgraceful as well.”

Whatever his debt to the United States and its institutions, Singer’s national allegiance is clear. “I’ve never thought of myself as an American,” he says, as we talk about how difficult it is for his countrymen to accept the insanity of US politics. “They are astounded about the gun laws,” he says. “Australia has very tough gun laws, and they were brought in by a conservative prime minister, John Howard. It’s just incredible to me that America cannot see how obviously terrible it is to have guns available to everybody.”

The critiques continue. “America lacks universal health care coverage, which is something that we Australians all take for granted,” Singer says. “This is perhaps more controversial, but we generally don’t think that it’s a good idea to have a Supreme Court that decides issues like abortion.”

Australians, he adds, have difficulty grappling with the outsize sway of money over politics and policy here. “It’s not that money has no influence in Australia,” he explains, “but it doesn’t have the same kind of influence on individual elected representatives, because what matters is the political party—and individual candidates for Parliament don’t have to raise their own money.”

Prior to Trump’s recent criminal conviction, over a vegan lunch at a Princeton dining hall, I ask Singer what he sees in America’s future. “You think philosophers have crystal balls, do you?” he asks with a smile. I counter that I do not, but that readers would be keenly interested in an astute traveler’s observations of our embattled democratic order. “You’re Alexis de Tocqueville in this story,” I say.

“I hope I can live up to it.”

He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Until recently, I thought that Trump was not going to be electable. I thought he had this 40 percent of hardcore supporters, but that wasn’t going to be enough. But obviously, the polls that have come out recently have been more scary than that. I wish there were a strong Democrat running for office who is not in his 80s, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.”

Trump’s behavior has polarized the nation and “encouraged this idea that we have our own set of facts,” he emphasizes. “Bush did some of that, too. I think Karl Rove said something like, ‘You’re living in the reality world.’ But Trump has made it so much worse, talking about the fake news stuff just to get people to believe that there were no facts you can agree on. I think that’s been very damaging to democracy.” (Rove has denied that he was the source of the quote in question, which the New York Times Magazine attributed to an anonymous “senior adviser to Bush.”)

Most utilitarians believe that engaging with ideas—even patently false ones—generally serves the greater good, but on the eve of the first presidential debate, which was disastrous for President Joe Biden, Singer said he thought Trump might be the rare exception. Debating Trump, he told me in an email, “would be unethical if this would-be despot, crazy person were not the overwhelmingly likely nominee of one of America’s two major political parties.”

Yet based purely on a political-utilitarian calculus, he figures Biden didn’t have much choice. “I think it would look weak to refuse to debate him,” Singer said. “Trump would make a lot of hay with that. He would say, ‘He’s old and senile and can’t do it.’”

After the debate, Singer wrote on X that “Biden should announce that at the Democratic Convention he will release his delegates to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump.” In a follow-up email, he cited the “terrible blot” of Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign on Nader’s own career as a consumer advocate and the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court while Democrats controlled the Senate, which resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade “and now is denying the EPA the power to issue essential environmental regulations.”

“Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean for the US and the world?” he said.

He fears what a second Trump term might portend. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s fossil-fuel cheerleading and hostility toward climate action. “He’s not going to do what needs to be done, and that’s a huge problem that dwarfs the others. Another four years,” Singer told me, “then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

The demise of the founders’ grand experiment isn’t far behind on his worry list: “Would it be the end of American democracy? Probably not is my guess, but there’s a much greater chance of it being the end of American democracy if Trump is elected than if he’s defeated. I wouldn’t like to take that risk. And the fact that he would not support Ukraine against his friend [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, whom he understands so well, is also a big worry. Because that’s not just about the plight of Ukraine, it’s about the rule of law in international affairs.”

His concern extends to the Gaza situation. “Trump is such a loose cannon” that he’s difficult to predict, Singer says. “But given the idea that he’s all about putting America’s interests first and he doesn’t seem to show that he cares much about other people, he may well believe that it’s in America’s interest for the Netanyahu government to do as it wishes. And that may be much worse for the Palestinian people than if Biden, who is at least trying to put some pressure on the Netanyahu government to have a ceasefire, remains in office.”

Back in McCosh Hall, the hour drew to a close—and with it Singer’s Princeton career.    

After nearly a quarter-century, there was a palpable sense he’d had enough. His farewell slide to his last-ever Practical Ethics class—which was followed by a rousing standing ovation from the students—had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy or politics or even ethics.

It was a photo of Singer in a wetsuit, surfboard in hand, practicing a hobby he took up in his 50s. “Bye,” it said. “I’ve gone surfing.”

Enlarge / Ariel and Caliban learned as kittens that scratching posts were fair game for their natural claw-sharpening instincts. (credit: Sean Carroll)

Ah, cats. We love our furry feline overlords despite the occasional hairball and their propensity to scratch the furniture to sharpen their claws. The latter is perfectly natural kitty behavior, but overly aggressive scratching is usually perceived as a behavioral problem. Veterinarians frown on taking extreme measures like declawing or even euthanizing such "problematic" cats. But there are alternative science-backed strategies for reducing or redirecting the scratching behavior, according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science.

This latest study builds on the group's prior research investigating the effects of synthetic feline facial pheromones on undesirable scratching in cats, according to co-author Yasemin Salgirli Demirbas, a veterinary researcher at Ankara University in Turkey. "From the beginning, our research team agreed that it was essential to explore broader factors that might exacerbate this issue, such as those influencing stress and, consequently, scratching behavior in cats," she told Ars. "What’s new in this study is our focus on the individual, environmental, and social dynamics affecting the level of scratching behavior. This perspective aims to enhance our understanding of how human and animal welfare are interconnected in different scenarios."

The study investigated the behavior of 1,211 cats, with data collected via an online questionnaire completed by the cats' caregivers. The first section collected information about the caregivers, while the second asked about the cats' daily routines, social interactions, environments, behaviors, and temperaments. The third and final section gathered information about the frequency and intensity of undesirable scratching behavior in the cats based on a helpful "scratching index."

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Enlarge / A Sixgill Hagfish (Eptatretus hexatrema) in False Bay, South Africa. (credit: Peter Southwood/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The humble hagfish is an ugly, gray, eel-like creature best known for its ability to unleash a cloud of sticky slime onto unsuspecting predators, clogging the gills and suffocating said predators. That's why it's affectionately known as a "snot snake." Hagfish also love to burrow into the deep-sea sediment, but scientists have been unable to observe precisely how they do so because the murky sediment obscures the view. Researchers at Chapman University built a special tank with transparent gelatin to overcome this challenge and get a complete picture of the burrowing behavior, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

“For a long time we’ve known that hagfish can burrow into soft sediments, but we had no idea how they do it," said co-author Douglas Fudge, a marine biologist who heads a lab at Chapman devoted to the study of hagfish. "By figuring out how to get hagfish to voluntarily burrow into transparent gelatin, we were able to get the first ever look at this process.”

As previously reported, scientists have been studying hagfish slime for years because it's such an unusual material. It's not like mucus, which dries out and hardens over time. Hagfish slime stays slimy, giving it the consistency of half-solidified gelatin. That's due to long, thread-like fibers in the slime, in addition to the proteins and sugars that make up mucin, the other major component. Those fibers coil up into "skeins" that resemble balls of yarn. When the hagfish lets loose with a shot of slime, the skeins uncoil and combine with the salt water, blowing up more than 10,000 times its original size.

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