Monthly Archives: October 2025

Mongabay: Booming sea otters and fading shellfish spark values clash in Alaska

Sea otters are lean, nonstop eating machines. They spend most of their lives in frigid Alaskan waters. Because they have no blubber, they must eat up to 30% of their body weight daily to maintain warmth. An exhibit in a National Park Service museum near Anchorage displays their favorite foods: urchins, mussels, butter and razor clams, moon snails. Credit: Wikicommons

I am particularly happy with this story that I reported during a more than two-week stay in southcentral Alaska in June/July, 2025. Here’s how it started.

When my partner and I decided on a vacation trip to Alaska, I knew I wanted to have a story to report during our stay. A Wake Forest colleague of mine, Greg Larsen, was working with the National Park Service in Juneau and connected me to someone he knew in the Anchorage office, Heather Coletti, a marine ecologist. After an extended phone call prior to flying west, she and I discussed various ideas regarding her research. We settled on sea otters — or rather, the implications of a newly surging sea otter population throughout the sweeping Gulf of Alaska on both near-shore ecosystems and the economy of shell-fishing and crabbing.

Sea otters were nearly hunted into extinction for their pelts a century ago. They were introduced into the Gulf of Alaska in the 1960s. Because their primary food sources have become so abundant, they’ve had all the food they need to rebuild their populations throughout the gulf. As apex predators, there is little, as of yet, to control that grow until until they eat through their food supply.

It turns out, these sleek, richly furred creatures must eat as much as 30% of their 50 pounds in body weight every day to stay thrive and reproduce. Some estimates put the number of sea otters in Alaska at 70,000 — up from a few thousand some 20 years ago. That’s when you start to glimpse why clams, crabs, oysters, mussels and snails are harder to find off the coasts of seafaring places like Homer, Seward, Cordova and Valdez — as well as plenty of roadless Native Alaskan communities that rely on nature for their basic dietary needs.

When I started reporting, I figured the story had essentially two sides — the otters’ positive impact on balancing intertidal ecosystems by helping kelp forests thrive and their controversial impact on the very seafoods we humans consider delicacies. But as I interviewed more expert sources during my travels, a more nuanced science, economic and cultural story emerged — with a significant Native Alaskan angle.

In recent summers, I’ve had the great opportunity to report for Mongabay from Olympic National Park, Vancouver Island and northern California. This reporting from Alaska might be my favorite.

A Native rights activist, Raven Cunningham says Native Alaskans hold the key to balancing sea otter populations in the Gulf of Alaska. Here, she holds an otter she hunted in Orca Bay in Prince William Sound, near where she lives in Cordova. Image courtesy of Bjorn Olsen.

Mongabay: Drax pellet mill wins appeal to raise pollution limits in small Mississippi town

Krystal Martin, right, co-founder of Greater Greener Gloster, attended the October Mississippi DEQ hearing with many of her neighbors, who say they were disappointed with the outcome. She stands beside Kadin Love, a social justice organizer with the Dogwood Alliance, an environmental nonprofit. Image courtesy of Krystal Martin.

What Mississippi gives to a poor, Black community in the state it can just as quickly take away. That’s what this story details. In May, I reported that a permitting committee of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality voted to deny wood-pellet maker Drax its request for a new classification to enable it to exceed air pollution standards.

In October, after a Drax appeal, the same committee sided with the company and against the small community — which has been telling anyone who will listen that the air pollution from one of the largest wood-pellet mills in the country is damaging their health and quality of life.

As my story explains: Pellet mills have increasingly come under fire from rural communities who accuse large-scale manufacturers like the U.K.’s Drax and Enviva in the U.S. of air pollution, dust and noise violations. A 2023 study found that pellet mills in the U.S. Southeast release 55 hazardous pollutants.

Moreover, the Drax plant has been fined more than $2.75 million since 2016 for exceeding toxic emissions limits. While Drax says it has invested millions in pollution mitigation technology to prevent future pollution, those living in Gloster told me they’ve seen no difference in their air quality.

Mongabay: There’s far less land available for reforestation than we think, study finds

A participant plants local green plants in a park as part of Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, which aims to plant 7.5 billion trees by the end of the year, at Jifara Ber site, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July 2025. (AP Photo/Amanuel Birhane)

In this story, I had an opportunity to evaluate an increasingly common national strategy of combatting climate change: planting trees. Lots and lots and lots of trees.

I first became familiar with massive tree-planting pledges as a way of fighting climate change at COP20 in Lima, Peru in 2014. The Bonn Challenge promised to reforest 350 million hectares of deforested or degraded land by 2030. The person declaring the great promise of this pledge was Bianca Jagger, the former wife of the Mick Jagger; her environmental nonprofit was an official sponsor of the challenge. It sounded great at the time. It sounded far less great as time went on.

Over the years, the national promises have mounted — to the extent where they became unrealistic if not plain misleading. Rather than do the hard work of reducing emissions and protecting biodiverse forests, countries simply promised to plant more and more trees — often in ecosystems such as savannas and grasslands that would be damaged by such efforts.

The new study in Science that I report on makes clear that there is far less available land for reforestation than imagined. Perhaps more importantly, as forestry expert Bill Moomaw shared with me, there is no shortcut to slowing down the ever-accelerating climate crisis.

Monoculture tree farms do very little to sequester carbon compared to mature, biodiverse forests. They do even less to harbor biodiversity. Here, you see an oil palm plantation (left) and native tropical rainforest on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Image by Rhett Ayers Butler/Mongabay.