The contest accepted photos taken between May 2024 and June 2025 in Laguna Beach’s Marine Protected Areas, which encompass the coves, cliffs and lagoons along most of the city’s six miles of coastline.

“We’re riding a wave of gratitude for everyone who dove into this year’s photo contest, from the talented photographers to the fabulous finned and flippered stars of theshow,” said Anne Girtz, a Bluebelt board member who runs the contest. “Every entry celebrating Laguna’s Marine Protected Areas overflowed with heart, color and deep love for our magical ocean world. These stunning snapshots don’t just capture beauty, they inspire awe, connection and a renewed commitment to protecting our ocean’s fragile brilliance.”

The contest awarded prizes in professional and amateur categories. Also, for the first time, it included a children’s under 13 category. The judges were Rich German, founder of Project O and an avid paddleboarder and photographer; marine scientist Julianne Steers; and filmmaker and ocean advocate Greg MacGillivray.

Bluebelt founders say the contest is not only a nod to the talent of photographers from Southern California and beyond but also a testament to the success of the preservation efforts of the state’s program of marine protected areas. The images are often used as examples to educate local government and state wildlife agencies about the success of the conservation efforts.

This year, in the amateur category, Kaelin Housewright of Los Angeles took first place; Michael Oakley of Long Beach received second place; and Yvonne Bellgardt of Pico Rivera won third place.

In the professional category, Craig Hatfield of Mission Viejo took first place; Noah Gilbert of Los Angeles came in second; and Jordan Manning of Dana Point won third place.

Hatfield, who took the “Heart Bubble” photo, said he found his image south of Main Beach near the Surf & Sand Hotel while he was in the water with a waterproof camera.

“At first, I did not notice the heart bubble that formed inside the wave,” he said. “I then noticed it at a later time and thought it was quite amazing. My son Chase noticed it looked like it says ‘LOV’ above the heart, and I was completely blown away.”

A fine art ocean and wave photographer, Hatfield said he developed his passion for photography in the water and the beauty of nature as a kid surfing at El Morro Beach. His favorite locations to shoot are along Laguna Beach’s shoreline and at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point.

“I am a firm believer in the conservation of all beaches and especially Laguna Beach, which in my opinion is the most beautiful beach in all of California,” he said.

Each category also included several photographs that won honorable mentions.

“Having photographed the ocean around the world for the past 60 years, I have to say that the submissions to this contest were outstanding and I am so encouraged because the amateur submissions were, in my opinion, equal to those in the professional division,” Macgillivary said. “That says a lot of people love and respect our marine protected area and the gift that the ocean generously gives to us each day is super well appreciated.”

Top winners will receive cash prizes during an artist reception on Aug. 7, hosted by the Laguna College of Art & Design at its gallery on Ocean Avenue, during the city’s popular Thursday Art Walk. The photos will be displayed at the gallery from then until Aug. 17.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is granting two years of regulatory relief to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturers and other polluting industries as he seeks to reverse Biden-era regulations he considers overly burdensome.

Trump issued a series of proclamations late Thursday exempting a range of industries that he calls vital to national security.

The proclamations cover coal-fired power plants, taconite iron ore processing facilities used to make steel, and chemical manufacturers that help produce semiconductors and medical device sterilizers.

The proclamations allow the facilities to comply with Environmental Protection Agency standards that were in place before rules imposed in recent years by President Joe Biden’s administration, the White House said.

Trump called the Biden-era rules expensive and, in some cases, unattainable. His actions will ensure that “critical industries can continue to operate uninterrupted to support national security without incurring substantial costs,” the White House said in a fact sheet.

Trump’s EPA had earlier exempted dozens of coal-fired plants from air-pollution rules for the same reasons. The EPA also offered other industrial polluters a chance for exemptions from requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene. An electronic mailbox set up by the EPA allowed regulated companies to request a presidential exemption under the Clean Air Act to a host of Biden-era rules.

Environmental groups have denounced the offer to grant exemptions, calling the new email address a “polluters’ portal” that could allow hundreds of companies to evade laws meant to protect the environment and public health. Mercury exposure can cause brain damage, especially in children. Fetuses are vulnerable to birth defects via exposure in a mother’s womb.

Within weeks of the EPA’s offer, industry groups representing hundreds of chemical and petrochemical manufacturers began seeking the blanket exemptions from federal pollution requirements.

The Clean Air Act enables the president to temporarily exempt industrial sites from new rules if the technology required to meet them is not widely available and if the continued activity is in the interest of national security.

John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said Trump’s claims about technology problems and national security concerns were “pretexts” so he could help big corporations get richer.

“President Trump just signed a literal free pass for polluters,″ Walke said. “If your family lives downwind of these plants, this is going to mean more toxic chemicals in the air you breathe.”

In April, the EPA granted nearly 70 coal-fired power plants a two-year exemption from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals. A list posted on the agency’s website lists 47 power providers — which operate at least 66 coal-fired plants — that are receiving exemptions from the Biden-era rules.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans in March to roll back dozens of key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. Zeldin called the planned rollbacks the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history.”

An Associated Press examination of the proposed rollbacks concluded that rules targeted by the EPA could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect. The AP review included the agency’s own prior assessments as well as a wide range of other research.

In a related development, the EPA said Thursday it will give utility companies an additional year to inspect and report on contamination from toxic coal ash landfills across the country.

“Today’s actions provide much needed regulatory relief for the power sector and help … unleash American energy,” Zeldin said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — All solar and wind energy projects on federal lands and waters must be personally approved by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum under a new order that authorizes him to conduct “elevated review” of activities ranging from leases to rights of way, construction and operational plans, grants and biological opinions.

The enhanced oversight on clean-energy projects is aimed at “ending preferential treatment for unreliable, subsidy-dependent wind and solar energy,” the Interior Department said in a statement Thursday. The order “will ensure all evaluations are thorough and deliberative” on potential projects on millions of acres of federal lands and offshore areas, the department said.

Clean-energy advocates said the action could hamstring projects that need to be underway quickly to qualify for federal tax credits that are set to expire under the tax-cut and spending bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4. The law phases out credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy while enhancing federal support for fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

“At a time when energy demand is skyrocketing, adding more layers of bureaucracy and red tape for energy projects at the Interior Department is exactly the wrong approach,” said Stephanie Bosh, senior vice president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “There’s no question this directive is going to make it harder to maintain our global (artificial intelligence) leadership and achieve energy independence here at home.”

In the legislation, Trump and GOP lawmakers moved to dismantle the 2022 climate law passed by Democrats under President Joe Biden. And on July 7, Trump signed an executive order that further restricts subsidies for what he called “expensive and unreliable energy policies from the Green New Scam.”

That order was part of a deal the Republican president made with conservative House Republicans who were unhappy that the tax-cut bill did not immediately end all subsidies for clean energy. A group of Republican senators, including Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Utah Sen. John Curtis, had pushed to delay phaseout of some of the credits to allow currently planned projects to continue.

Trump has long expressed disdain for wind power, describing it at a Cabinet meeting last week as an expensive form of energy that “smart” countries do not use.

Even with the changes approved by the Senate, the new law will likely crush growth in the wind and solar industry and lead to a spike in Americans’ utility bills, Democrats and environmental groups say. The law jeopardizes hundreds of renewable energy projects intended to boost the nation’s electric grid as demand is set to rise amid sharp growth from data centers, artificial intelligence and other uses, they said.

“This isn’t oversight. It’s obstruction that will needlessly harm the fastest growing sources of electric power,” said Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, an industry group. He called the move “particularly confounding” as lawmakers in both parties seek to streamline permitting for all sources of American energy.

‘Level the playing field’

The Interior Department said Thursday that Burgum’s order will “level the playing field for dispatchable, cost-effective and secure energy sources,” such as coal and natural gas “after years of assault under the previous administration.″

“American energy dominance is driven by U.S.-based production of reliable baseload energy, not regulatory favoritism towards unreliable energy projects that are solely dependent on taxpayer subsidies and foreign-sourced equipment,” said Adam Suess, the acting assistant secretary for lands and minerals management.

While Democrats complain the tax law will make it harder to get renewable energy to the electric grid, Republicans say it supports production of traditional energy sources such as oil, gas and coal, as well as nuclear power, increasing reliability.

In the Senate compromise, wind and solar projects that begin construction within a year of the law’s enactment are allowed to get a full tax credit without a deadline for when the projects are “placed in service,″ or plugged into the grid. Wind and solar projects that begin later must be placed in service by the end of 2027 to get a credit.

The law retains incentives for technologies such as advanced nuclear, geothermal and hydropower through 2032.

About 10% of new solar power capacity under development is on federal lands, said Sylvia Leyva Martínez, a principal analyst at the Wood Mackenzie research firm. Those projects could be delayed or canceled if Burgum does not issue permits for them, she said. Related projects such as transmission lines could be affected, too, she said.

While only about 1% of the combined capacity of pending wind projects are on federal lands, delays could affect nearby infrastructure that supports renewable projects, said Wood Mackenzie analyst Diego Espinosa.

Associated Press writer Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

The masonite plate, called a Hester-Dendy sampler, helps biologists like Glandon scrape algae off underwater rocks. Just a few feet below the surface, she reached a huge underwater ridge made of limestone and other rocks piled into 750-foot rows parallel to the coast.

On this dive in late June, a crew of four scuba divers ferried equipment back and forth between the kayaks and the underwater ridges, collecting sediment samples near the boulders and dropping off underwater cameras on the bottom of the lake. As the divers continued their work, a thick morning fog began to fade, giving way to clear blue waters. From the surface, schools of juvenile fish could be spotted drifting between patches of sunlight at the bottom of the ridges.

These structures, called “rubble ridges,” aren’t just typical rocky reefs found on the bottom of the Great Lakes — they’re entirely man-made.

“We just want to see, are these reefs impacting aquatic biodiversity as well as sediment retention?” Glandon said. “We’re trying to get the whole picture of the aquatic community, and in order to do that, we need to sample in a lot of different ways. It allows us to not only look at the sediment … but also the critters that are living in there.”

Man-made reefs have become a popular way to provide a habitat for fish in coastal communities. The rubble ridges, however, are also designed as a cost-effective tool to prevent erosion. Each ridge sits about 3 to 5 feet beneath the lake’s surface, which allows them to block some of the energy and sediments carried by waves during intense winter storms. When these waves reach the coast, they don’t hit the shoreline as hard, which slows the process of erosion. And the gaps between each ridge help to retain some sediment without fully stopping the natural flow of sand.

“The designers call it passive sand management, just to slow erosion down when it’s the worst,” said Steve Brown, the Illinois state geologist. “That was part of the idea — a lower-cost offshore breakwater system. And we’re trying to see, does it work like the designers thought it would work?”

Glandon and her team of biologists and geologists at the Lake Michigan Biological Station, a research station in Zion run by the University of Illinois, are studying the rubble ridges as part of a federally funded pilot project through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The initiative is a collaborative effort that provides funding to over a dozen federal agencies to protect the Great Lakes through infrastructure and lake monitoring projects.

Installed at Illinois Beach State Park in 2021 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the ridges are being monitored along with another artificial reef at Fort Sheridan in Highland Park, as well as two control sites, about 2 miles south of each respective reef.

In this part of Lake Michigan, just 3 miles south of the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, the lake bottom consists of a flat layer of sand, which doesn’t usually attract invertebrates and smaller fish.

But as Glandon descended onto the rocky ridge, she saw hundreds of fish, from species that tend to stay near the reef year-round like the round goby, to schools of younger migratory species like alewife that were using the ridge as a nursery habitat.

By analyzing both biodiversity and shoreline changes at the reef, researchers are hoping to see whether this new kind of infrastructure could be scaled up as a tool for cities across the Great Lakes.

“Lake Michigan is a very dynamic place. It is always changing, and it always wants to change, and it always will change,” said Philip Willink, a biologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey and an expert on natural reefs in Chicago. “People don’t like that change and are trying to hold the shoreline in stasis, when, in reality, nature wants to erode some shoreline … But how do we put that into city planning?”

Tracking shoreline changes

As Glandon and a crew of three other scuba divers and two kayakers ventured out to sample algae and sediments at the ridges, a few other researchers remained onshore to help handle equipment. It was the research team’s first dive of the year, and biologist Scot Peterson could already spot the traces of erosion from the winter’s storms.

Where a wooden boardwalk had once extended out over the beach, only a small chunk of wood remained, poking out from under a sand dune on a nearby roadbed. Strong waves had gradually weakened the structure over the past few years, and last year, the state park decided to remove it altogether.

“Every time I come back, it feels like something has changed,” Peterson said.

Sights like these are common across the Great Lakes, and Lake Michigan in particular can be especially “unpredictable,” said Liz Spitzer, a coastal geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey. The lake’s levels tend to fluctuate from low to high in 10- to 30-year cycles, with levels usually reaching their annual peak during the summer.

However, climate change is speeding up these fluctuations, experts say. In January 2013, Lake Michigan was at a record low. Just 3 ½ years later, the lake had risen 4 feet and by July 2020, it nearly broke the record high. Lake levels have always fluctuated, but that has been over a period of decades. Now these shifts are happening within a few years. That variability is attributed to multiple factors, but increased precipitation from climate change is the driving force.

Today, lake levels are hovering at about 579 feet, close to the lake’s average.

At Illinois Beach State Park, these fluctuations have taken a toll, causing extreme erosion along the coastline. Kellogg Creek, located just south of the rubble ridges, has flooded several times over the past few years, damaging one of the buildings that researchers at the Lake Michigan Biological Station used to store samples. The lake bed at the northern part of the beach has eroded away, leaving grass roots exposed as windswept dunes pile up behind the shore.

In response, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources approved a massive breakwater installation project in 2019 for the state park. The state spent $73 million to install 22 breakwaters along a 2.2-mile stretch of the state park’s shoreline, making it the largest capital project in IDNR history.

According to a 2023 release about the breakwaters, the state intended the structures to “guide and direct the movement of the sand instead of simply trying to prevent its movement.” The breakwaters, made of stone, are angled slightly to the northwest to block storms that typically come from that direction. IDNR officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The breakwaters, along with 430,000 cubic feet of sand that was added to bolster the beach, have helped rehabilitate the beach since construction finished in August 2024. The first chain of breakwaters ends just a few hundred feet north of the rubble ridges.

With extreme erosion and other construction projects unfolding at the state park, Glandon said her team has had to deal with several “confounding factors” at this reef site.

“The rubble was actually supposed to be built a little bit north of where it currently is, and that’s because the large breakwater project was in the process of being designed when the rubble was being implemented,” Glandon said. “They moved (the rubble) further south to accommodate those breakwaters.”

The monitoring project at Illinois Beach State Park began in 2021 and is set to wrap up next year. The other artificial reef site at Fort Sheridan has been monitored since 2023 under a different project funded by the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. Researchers are comparing the results between the two sites, hoping to explain how reef systems function along different types of shorelines. The shoreline at Fort Sheridan consists mostly of rocky bluffs, and the lake bottom in that area is dotted with small boulders.

Each spring, geologists have used drones to map the elevation of the bottom of the lake, allowing them to compare any changes in the lake’s topography that happened during the winter storm season and see if the reefs are helping retain sediment.

According to the research team’s preliminary results, the Fort Sheridan reef has successfully helped to build up some sand. At Illinois Beach State Park, though, erosion has overall increased. Most of this erosion occurred between 2022 and 2024, with very little change happening at the site during the 2025 winter season.

“The sediment dynamics, that part of it is going to be very hard to make any conclusions without a huge asterisk, since they built these big breakwaters,” Glandon said. “But what we’re hoping to do is kind of zoom out with the geology story, and tell it from the perspective of before they built these big breakwaters and after. We’re just trying to be nimble with the way we’re sampling.”

Starved of sand

Illinois Beach State Park, which boasts the state’s longest continuous stretch of natural shoreline, is somewhat of an anomaly. The park takes up 6.5 of Illinois’ 63 miles of coastline along Lake Michigan, and the majority of this coastline consists of man-made structures, such as breakwaters or seawalls.

This infrastructure is meant to help protect the urban coastline from eroding. However, it’s not how the shoreline naturally functions, according to Spitzer.

“Along this stretch of the coast, the dominant current is generally coming from the north, going southward,” she said. “Over the past couple thousand years, with the direction of the dominant current, we’ve been seeing the sand moving southward over time. And then human activity adds an extra layer of complexity to that, because that compartmentalizes where the sand can go.”

The goal of most coastal protection structures, like seawalls, is to retain sand that’s flowing through the lake. This helps build up extra sand along lakefront beaches and harbors, and lessens the impacts of erosion. Sand was already a scarce resource in southern Lake Michigan before humans began to build coastal infrastructure, according to a 2020 study conducted by Brown and other geological survey researchers, making sand retention in the area particularly vital.

But man-made structures, which often run perpendicular to the shore, can also block the natural southward flow of sand. So while seawalls can build up sand in one location, a beach directly downstream of that seawall might face worse erosion as a result.

“Every time we create a structure, it stops the sand movement, and you get erosion downstream,” said Brown. “And so the real question is that we haven’t sorted out how to live along the lake.”

The rubble ridges were designed to be an “actively moving system,” Glandon said — as waves crash against the ridges over several years, researchers expect that some of the boulders will tumble to the bottom, flattening out over time.

Since reef structures like the rubble ridges run parallel to the coast, they serve as somewhat of a middle ground — they retain some sand near the coastline but still allow most of it to pass through. So as the sand moves downstream, it leaves more for lakefront properties to the south to use as they build up their own shorelines, helping distribute sediments more evenly across the lake.

That’s part of the reasoning behind government investments in this project, Glandon said. Currently, most municipalities along the North Shore run their own coastal management programs and tend to build shoreline infrastructure like seawalls without consulting their neighbors. When one town builds a seawall, it creates a so-called domino effect — that can starve neighbors of sand directly to the south, and usually the only solution is to build their own seawalls.

“When we have private land ownership, it can be tricky to manage sediment movement that occurs outside of those human-created bounds,” Glandon said.

Using infrastructure like artificial reefs, or other more natural designs, could help alleviate the need to build seawall after seawall. It also presents a relatively low-cost option — installing the rubble ridges cost just over $1.4 million.

“One of the hopes of our program is to try to provide this quantitative data on the effects of these structures … to give towns and local managers options for ways that they could potentially retain some sand in their areas without impacting their neighbors as much,” Glandon said.

Building biodiversity

From the shores of Fort Sheridan and Illinois Beach State Park, the artificial reefs are invisible, hovering just beneath the surface. For aquatic creatures, though, these rocky reefs are a landmark, rising distinctly above the lake bottom.

“Most of the bottom of Lake Michigan is pretty flat. It’s either sand or mud, with no real features,” Willink said. “But every once in a while, there are natural reefs out there, and these can be in shallow water, in deeper water, they can be from a variety of sources as well.”

Willink, the biologist who now works with the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois, worked for many years at Chicago’s Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium. There, he studied one of Chicago’s most iconic underwater landmarks.

Morgan Shoal, located just off the coast of Promontory Point by 53rd Street, is one of a handful of naturally occurring rocky reefs in Lake Michigan. This reef is actually a remnant of Chicago’s ancient past, Willink said — about 425 million years ago, the modern-day Great Lakes region was located south of the equator, submerged in a tropical sea that was home to several coral reefs.

Though the region’s latitude has shifted, traces like the rocky reefs remain on the bottom of the lake, providing an ideal habitat for fish. Morgan Shoal features a wide variety of “nooks and crannies,” Willink said, which provide habitats for a range of animals from large migratory fish to small invertebrates and worms.

“In the smaller spaces, that’s where we found a lot of the aquatic insects and worms — things which may not sound super exciting, but that is the bottom of the food chain,” Willink said. “This is the key, to have a variety of different habitats. When you do that, you create more of a larger variety of living spaces for a larger variety of species. And then ultimately, you end up with a higher biodiversity on the site.”

While natural reefs often provide more appealing habitats for fish, artificial reefs are also widely used for the same purpose, and have been shown to boost biodiversity.

This has been shown at the rubble ridges, too. Both the Illinois Beach State Park and Fort Sheridan reefs showed a significant increase in fish populations and biodiversity when compared against the control site for each reef, according to preliminary data from the Lake Michigan Biological Station research team.

The team tracks fish diversity with a number of different measures. During the June dive at Illinois Beach State Park, kayakers carried large aluminum frames, each with an underwater camera mounted in the middle, out to the reefs. Scuba divers carried these frames down to the reefs, where they’ll remain for the rest of the summer season.

The cameras are programmed to take a picture every five minutes, which helps scientists track the density and mass of the fish living on the reef.

“We see at the control sites, biomass is high, but abundance is low, versus at the reef sites, we have much smaller fish,” Glandon said. “We think it’s because this is showing that the reefs are nursery habitats for these fish.”

They also take samples of algae living on the underwater boulders that make up the reef, and collect sediments to see what types of invertebrates are living at the site. These invertebrates are the core of the food chain, attracting smaller fish in search of food sources.

While fish and invertebrates do sometimes seek shelter around man-made breakwaters, Willink said they’re most attracted to natural structures that don’t totally stop the flow of sand.

“Part of the key is that it isn’t a dam to the sand, it doesn’t hold the sand there,” Willink said. “If there’s too much sediment, that would smother all these small places.”

As the reef monitoring project continues, so does the constant movement of sand. Despite humans’ best efforts to counter this, the currents of the lake are ever-changing and ever-powerful, scientists say. As lakefront communities have built containment structures along their waterfronts, this trend has remained the same — even at established places like Illinois Beach State Park, waves surge above boardwalks, benches sink beneath sand, roadways are left to crumble in the face of encroaching shorelines.

“A lot of what we’re facing right now in the 21st century is, how do we deal with nature in urban areas? How do we live with nature next to us and allow nature to do its thing, and yet still maintain the infrastructure of a city?” Willink said. “And I think that’s sort of an emerging field, trying to figure out how to deal with this sort of struggle between the two. It’s not just restricted to Lake Michigan — it’s everywhere.”

Lily Carey is a freelancer.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — U.S. land managers are racing the clock as hotter, drier weather raises the risk of wildfires in the nation’s overgrown forests with each passing year.

One tool is to use the flames from lightning-sparked wildfires when conditions allow or to plan prescribed fires for other times of the year to clear out dense vegetation as a way to limit future risks.

Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona for decades has been a leader at using fire to make the ecosystem more resilient. A lightning-sparked fire along the North Rim that started July 4 presented an opportunity for fire to play its natural role.

After a week conditions quickly deteriorated. Wind-whipped flames rushed toward the iconic Grand Canyon Lodge and the surrounding historic cabins. Many were reduced to rubble and ash.

It’s not the first time firefighters have been on the losing end of trying to wrangle the forces of nature.

Still, experts say fire is a critical land management tool, pointing to countless examples where the work has paid off.

“We focus so much on the fires that go bad and almost nothing on the 99% plus that do great work,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science and forest policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Unless we get the forests in a more resilient condition with low fire hazards, we will be chasing our tails forever.”

Searching for new tools

On the North Rim, managers working the Dragon Bravo Fire say crews had constructed containment lines and were prepared for more defensive maneuvers before conditions rapidly changed.

Uncharacteristically strong winds pushed the flames past multiple containment lines, prompting mandatory evacuations for remaining North Rim residents.

Crews in New Mexico also were forced to change their strategy in battling a blaze burning in the Santa Fe National Forest after a spot fire was discovered beyond containment lines. Ranchers there shared pictures of dead cattle on charred grazing allotments, criticizing officials for not putting out the flames sooner.

Experts agree there’s always room for improvement when it comes to managing wildfires and planning for prescribed fires, especially as technology improves to help fire managers predict what the flames might do.

University of Utah atmospheric scientist Derek Mallia is among those working on new forecasting tools. He’s tracking fires in Utah and Arizona in preparation for a project next year that will focus on pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or those towering thunderstorms that sometimes form above wildfires.

Mallia said fire forecasting hasn’t advanced as quickly as tools for other severe events like tornados and hurricanes. That’s partly because fires happen on a finer scale, making the work more difficult. Managers also have to account for the legacy of built-up fuels in the forests and the compounding factor of climate change, he said.

For example, he said fires are burning hotter at night than they used to.

“That used to be a time of the day where there was a good opportunity to kind of jump on a fire, get it contained and make a lot of meaningful progress,” he said. “That’s a lot more difficult now.”

Researchers also are trying to better understand how fires affect weather patterns. Mallia explained that fires are part of a more complex feedback loop that makes forecasting even more challenging.

Still, the biggest issue is the condition of the forests and their susceptibility to high severity wildfire, said Stephens, the California professor.

Andi Thode, a professor of fire ecology and management at Northern Arizona University and the lead at the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, agreed. She said using a lightning-sparked fire or taking years to plan a prescribe burn is a matter of deferred risk for fire managers.

“Do you want to take your risk now with a lightning ignition that seems to be functioning in the way that you want it to with weather predictions that are not too bad? Or do you want to push that risk back to later in the worst time of the year?” she said. “Fire managers are always juggling this now.”

Lessons already learned

For Native Americans, fire has long been a part of life and crucial for forest health. Westward settlement all but eradicated those attitudes until ecologists ignited a shift in the way policymakers thought about fire.

The first wilderness fire management program was established in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks more than a half-century ago, as policies shifted from suppression to management. Other parks followed, with thousands of lightning-sparked fires being allowed to burn under carefully monitored conditions in dozens of parks across the U.S.

But there have been costly lessons, including at Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico, where a prescribed fire was set in the spring of 2000 to treat 2 square miles of dense forest.

Strong winds, dry conditions and insufficient resources contributed to the destruction of homes as the fire ballooned to nearly 75 square miles. Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the nations’ premier nuclear weapons labs and the birthplace of the atomic bomb, also closed.

The Cerro Grande Fire forever changed the landscape around Los Alamos, prompted congressional inquiries, led to a host of recommendations from nonpartisan government watchdogs and formed the basis of new training programs.

Changing conditions

It’s not that the lessons faded from memory, but the circumstances are more dire with a drier landscape across much of the U.S. West.

That was the case in 2022, when the U.S. Forest Service forged ahead with a pair of prescribed burning operations in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains as pressure mounted to address the wildfire threat.

Outdated models and miscalculations by managers resulted in what was the largest blaze in New Mexico’s recorded history. Rural communities were uprooted and the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire wasn’t contained for four months.

During the conflagration, the Forest Service put on hold its prescribed fire program and conducted a lengthy review that resulted in numerous reforms. Congress approved billions in recovery dollars, with FEMA paying out about $2.6 billion so far.

A 2024 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted 43 prescribed fire projects between 2012 and 2021 out of 50,000 prescribed fire projects. That included blazes in national forests in more than a dozen states — from the California-Nevada border to Utah, New Mexico, Idaho, North Carolina and Arkansas.

The Forest Service alone ignites about 4,500 prescribed fires each year, with the agency saying most are successful. But support wavers each time a fire escapes, like in New Mexico and now with the lightning-sparked fire at the Grand Canyon.

Thode said fire managers weigh many variables when making decisions — from wind speed and topography to the dryness of the fuels and moisture deficits within the atmosphere.

“There’s a lot of science that goes behind what the folks are doing on the ground to manage these ecosystems,” she said.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska is suing Colorado over the amount of water it draws from the South Platte River, the latest in a long history of water rights disputes between the states that have been left increasingly dry by climate change.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and state Attorney General Mike Hilgers held a news conference Wednesday to announce the lawsuit, which was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s crystal clear. Colorado has been holding water back from Nebraska for almost 100 years and getting more and more egregious every single day,” Pillen said, pointing to Colorado’s rapidly expanding population over the past decade.

“So today it’s really, really simple: We’re here to put our gloves on,” Pillen said. “We’re going to fight like heck. We’re going to get every drop of water.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser called the lawsuit “unfortunate” in a written statement and said Nebraska officials failed “to look for reasonable solutions.”

The lawsuit accuses Colorado of depriving Nebraska of as much as 1.3 million acre-feet of water from the river over several years that Nebraska is entitled to under a 1923 compact between the states. The suit also accuses Colorado officials of blocking Nebraska’s effort to construct a massive canal — often called the Perkins County Canal — and reservoir project that would see Nebraska seize land in Colorado to divert water into Nebraska, which is also allowed under the compact.

Nebraska needs the water not only for agriculture production in its southwestern region — which climate experts predict will grow hotter and drier in the coming decades — but also to feed water supplies in the eastern part of the state, officials said. Nebraska’s capital, Lincoln, is expected to get 12% of its water from the proposed canal, Pillen said.

The compact entitles Nebraska to 120 cubic feet per second from the river during the irrigation season between April 1 and Oct. 15 each year, and 500 cubic feet per second during the non-irrigation fall and winter months. Hilgers said Colorado has been shortchanging Nebraska during the irrigation season, allowing only about 75 cubic feet per second of water daily into Nebraska this summer.

“I think this may be the most consequential lawsuit that this office will be a part of in my generation,” Hilgers said. “It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the South Platte River to the future of the state of Nebraska.”

The South Platte, which flows through northeastern Colorado into southwestern Nebraska, has been at the center of a tempest brewing between the two states going back to 2022, when Nebraska announced it would build the canal.

Since then, officials from the two states have been haggling over how to carry out both the terms of the compact and land acquisition to build the canal.

“It became clear, despite the very professional and intentional scope of those negotiations, that we were at an impasse,” Hilgers said.

Weiser countered that Nebraska officials should have remained at the negotiating table.

“Nebraska’s actions will force Colorado water users to build additional new projects to lessen the impact of the proposed Perkins County Canal,” he said. “When the dust finally settles, likely over a billion dollars will have been spent — tens of millions of that on litigation alone — and no one in Nebraska or Colorado will be better off.”

Hilgers said the lawsuit was filed directly with the Supreme Court because it handles disputes between states. The process “isn’t fast,” Hilgers warned.

“We’ll probably have a special master appointed within the next 12 months, and under normal litigation timelines, that’s maybe 3 to 5 years before we get a result,” he said.

That does not mean work on the canal will stop, he said, as he expects work on permitting and design of the canal to continue.

Nebraska has been at the center of interstate water disputes for decades. In 2002, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas reached a settlement over Republican River water allocation after years of legal wrangling. But disputes continued, and new agreements were reached among the states again in 2014.

Water disputes could become more common as climate change worsens shortages, said Dr. Carly Phillips, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists — a nonprofit that advocates for climate change solutions.

Warmer temperatures affect multiple parts of the hydrological cycle, Phillips said. It is decreasing the snowpack, which is the main way water is stored in the western U.S. Higher temperatures also mean the snow melts earlier each year, changing the availability of stream flow. And states like Nebraska might see increased irrigation demand when it’s hotter.

“These patterns are all in the same direction across the board,” Phillips said. “The trends are really consistent when it comes to snowpack, stream flow, evaporation and irrigation demand.”

Associated Press reporter Sarah Raza contributed from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

GENEVA (AP) — Soccer had a fierce reckoning with heat at the recently concluded FIFA Club World Cup in the United States — a sweltering preview of what players and fans may face when the U.S. co-hosts the World Cup with Mexico and Canada next summer.

With temperatures rising worldwide, scientists warn that staging the World Cup and other soccer tournaments in the Northern Hemisphere summer is getting increasingly dangerous for both players and spectators. Some suggest that FIFA may have to consider adjusting the soccer calendar to reduce the risk of heat-related illnesses.

“The deeper we go in the decade, the greater the risk without considering more dramatic measures, such as playing in the winter months and/or cooler latitudes,” said Prof. Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures in Leeds, England. “I’m getting increasingly worried that we are only one heatwave away from a sporting tragedy and I would like to see governing bodies lean into the climate and health science.”

Tournament soccer in June and July is a tradition going back to the first World Cup in 1930.

Since then, the three-month period of June, July and August globally has warmed by 1.89 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Meanwhile, European summer temperatures have increased by 1.81 degrees C. The rate of warming has accelerated since the 1990’s.

Climate scientists say that’s a factor that needs to be considered when playing high-intensity outdoor sports like soccer.

“If you want to play football for 10 hours a day, they’ll have to be the hours of the early morning and late evening,” climatologist Friederike Otto from Imperial College, London, told The Associated Press in an email, “if you don’t want to have players and fans die from heatstroke or get severely ill with heat exhaustion.”

FIFA adapts

Extreme heat and thunderstorms made an impact on FIFA’s newly expanded tournament for club teams. The Club World Cup was held in 11 American cities from June 14 to July 13.

FIFA adapted by tweaking its extreme heat protocol to include extra breaks in play, more field-side water, and cooling the team benches with air fans and more shade.

Still, Chelsea midfielder Enzo Fernández said the heat made him dizzy and urged FIFA to avoid afternoon kickoffs at the World Cup next year.

The global soccer players union, FIFPRO, has warned that six of the 16 World Cup cities next year are at “extremely high risk” for heat stress.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino addressed the heat concerns on Saturday, saying the handful of World Cup stadiums that are covered would be used for day-time games next year.

Extreme heat could become an even bigger challenge at the following World Cup in 2030, which will be co-hosted by Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Games are scheduled to be played in afternoons and early evenings from mid-June to mid-July. All three countries have already seen temperatures rise well above 100 Fahrenheit this summer.

FIFA downplayed the heat risk in its in-house evaluation of the 2030 World Cup bid, saying “weather conditions are difficult to predict with the current development in global and local climate, but are unlikely to affect the health of players or other participants.”

Heat exhaustion

The physical effects of playing 90 minutes of soccer in direct sunshine during the hottest part of the day can be severe and potentially result in hyperthermia – abnormally high body temperatures.

“When players experience hyperthermia, they also experience an increase in cardiovascular strain,” said Julien Périard of the University of Canberra.

“If core temperature increases excessively, exertional heat illness can occur,” leading to muscle cramping, heat exhaustion, and even life-threatening heat stroke, he said.

Many sports events held in the summer adjust their start times to early morning or late night to minimize the risk heat-related illness, including marathons at the Olympics or track world championships. Morning kickoffs, however, are rare in soccer, where World Cup match schedules are often set with European TV audiences in mind.

It would be hard for FIFA to avoid day-time World Cup kickoffs given the packed match schedule as the number of participating teams increases from 32 to 48 in 2026.

Calendar rethink

Heat mainly becomes an issue when the World Cup is held in the Northern Hemisphere, because June and July are winter months in the Southern Hemisphere.

FIFA has stuck to its traditional June-July schedule for the men’s World Cup except in 2022 when it moved the tournament to November-December to avoid the summer heat in Qatar. Something similar is expected when neighboring Saudi Arabia hosts the tournament in 2034.

However, moving the World Cup to another part of the year is complicated because it means Europe’s powerful soccer leagues must interrupt their season, affecting both domestic leagues and the Champions League.

FIFA didn’t respond to questions from AP about whether alternate dates for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups were being considered.

When and where to schedule the World Cup and other outdoor sports events is likely to become more pressing as the world continues to warm.

Athletes and even everyday people doing basic physical activities are now exposed to 28% more of moderate or higher heat risk in 2023 than they were in the 1990s, said Ollie Jay, a professor at the University of Sydney who has helped shape policy for the Australian Open in tennis.

“This is symbolic of something bigger,” said Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist. “Not just the danger and inconvenience to fans and players, but the fundamentally disruptive nature of climate change when it comes our current way of life.”

Borenstein contributed from Washington, D.C.

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

In fact, the land where Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration quickly erected the new immigrant detention center, which is expected to eventually hold 3,000 or more people, has been deeply controversial since the 1960s.

It was supposed to be the planet’s largest jetport and inspire a new city in the middle of the Everglades.

Bipartisan outrage over those dreams (or nightmares) united an odd cross section of Floridians: birder watchers, hunters, native tribes, blue-collar plumbers and Republican advisers.

This David-and-Goliath battle pitted them against heavy hitters: the Dade County Port Authority, the Federal Aviation Administration, the state of Florida, the air transport industry and eager chambers of commerce.

The ensuing fight over the jetport, which eventually drew in then-President Richard Nixon’s administration, was the catalyst for creating Big Cypress National Preserve, and helped shape the environmental movement we know today.

And the bipartisan outrage of the 1960s echoes through today’s protests about that same piece of land.

Heady times and jetport dreams

The 1960s were heady times for Florida. The population jumped by 40%, ramping from about five million in 1960 to nearly seven million by 1970.

As the population (and real estate values) boomed, the Dade County Port Authority started buying up 39 square miles of cypress swamp and Miccosukee ceremonial sites that sat a few miles from both Everglades National Park and Miccosukee tribal land.

They had a dream of building the world’s largest jetport. It would be five times the size of JFK International Airport, big enough to welcome 50 million passengers and one million flights a year, and would serve both the east and west coasts of the state.

The Port Authority had “Jetsons”-esque ambitions — South Florida was poised for global greatness, and the Everglades were in the way.

They claimed Miami’s existing airport would reach capacity by 1973: South Florida needed the jetport!

According to the National Park Service, the plan called for a corridor three football fields wide to span across the Everglades from Miami to the jetport, and then on through the Big Cypress Swamp to the west coast. There’d be both an interstate highway and a train shuttle ripping through at 200 mph.

The maximalist vision of the jetport supporters was that Miami would sprawl 40 miles out into the Everglades and eventually envelop the jetport.

Historian Jack Davis, of the University of Florida, has devoted his studies to the state’s history. He wrote extensively about the battle over the jetport in his 2009 Marjory Stoneman Douglas biography, “An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century.”

Davis writes that Port Authority director Alan Stewart “envisioned an industrial center congealing around the jetport and the city of Miami expanding toward it. … A new city is going to rise up in the middle of Florida, whether you like it or not.”

The assumption was that development, by definition, brought benefits to the region.

The benefits of saving the only Everglades in the world, and the region’s water supply, were not part of the equation. What harm could come from jet fuel?

‘We thought it was a done deal’

According to Davis, the Port Authority and Federal Aviation Administration did not consult with the national park when selecting the site for the jetport, even though the jetport was upstream from the park and would either flow pollution in or dry it out.

A reporter turned president of the local chapter of the Audubon Society, the late Joe Browder, had the reputation of being a “tenacious bulldog” and a “brash militant.” Those tendencies would come in handy during the impending fight, in which he would pull together an oddball team of conservationists and change the fate of South Florida.

The jetport broke ground in 1968. Much like the DeSantis administration’s rapid-fire build-out of Alligator Alcatraz, which relied on emergency declarations, the Port Authority’s strategy was to build as quickly as possible.

“DeSantis’ position is that illegal immigration is an emergency. … One might say it stretches the definition of an emergency,” said Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “An emergency is something that happens very quickly and requires an immediate response.”

Jewett uses the 1980 Mariel boatlift as an example of something that was an immigration emergency. “With little notice, Fidel Castro allowed Cubans to leave the island, and it happened in a brief window of time, and involved hundreds of thousands of people coming to one area — Miami. Literally local communities were overwhelmed.”

“You know, it was just like the Alligator Alcatraz thing — the public didn’t know about the jetport, and the Port Authority was quietly buying up all that land behind the scenes, and we were caught off guard,” said Franklin Adams, who was a crucial part of the jetport battle.

He was in his 20s in the late 1960s when he joined Browder in the fight as a member of the sportsman’s group the Izaak Walton League. He fell in love with Florida wilderness while tagging along as a teen with his father, a land surveyor. “I started seeing some of these incredible places that he surveyed get destroyed, diked. With us going out and roaming the Big Cypress and Everglades, we saw beautiful tree islands inundated and destroyed.”

By the time Browder, Adams and other conservationists became organized, some of the runways were already built, and real estate signs started popping up. “We thought it was a done deal,” Adams said. Adams is now 87 and lives in a rural area not far from Big Cypress National Preserve.

As the bulldozers were prepping the swamp for pending runways, Adams and friend Charles Garrett managed to get a meeting with one of the heavy hitters: Port Authority deputy chief Richard Judy. Adams and Garrett implored Judy to reconsider the jetport location. “It was in the watershed of Everglades National Park, (I explained) all the problems it would cause.”

The meeting did not last long. Judy listened briefly, then abruptly ended the meeting, saying that the men had wasted their time and his, Adams recalled. “Well, after that happened, it made us more determined than ever to fight that thing and stop it,” Adams said.

Once the cat was out of the bag, developers on both coasts grew frothy at the mouth. An advertisement of the day read, “Mammoth jetport to whisk community into the future: The future development of Marco Island received a tremendous boost recently with the start of construction of a mammoth jetport, the biggest ever, anywhere just 48 miles away.”

The Collier family and the JC Turner Lumber Company owned much of the land in Big Cypress swamp, and started selling it off at $10 an acre. “People were buying it from all over the world,” Adams said.

According to the Florida National Park Association, real estate billboards were popping up all along the Tamiami Trail at the time the airport was planned. “$10.00 down, $10.00 a month, buy land, get rich,” one read.

“Airport in Glades Could Bring in $$” read a 1967 Miami Herald headline. A local politician at the time predicted it would be the most important airport in the region by 1990.

An unlikely coalition

Browder knew the local Audubon Society couldn’t take this fight on alone. He would need to build a coalition.

Florida Gov. Claude Kirk had shoveled dirt at the jetport groundbreaking with a grin on his face, but his special assistant on the environment, Republican Nathaniel Reed, was troubled by what he considered runaway development in Florida.

Reed grew up exploring and fishing around Jupiter Island. He was disgusted by the slash-and-burn development mentality in Florida, and felt that the “Great God of Growth” was decimating his state. Reed imagined what the land he loved would look like if the jetport dreams came true, and took a stance against it. He had the governor’s ear, as well as some in Washington, D.C.

Browder also connected with famed environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who then founded the nonprofit Friends of the Everglades in order to fight the jetport.

Browder pulled in other potential allies as well. “Astute in ways other environmentalists were not, he recognized that environmental concerns were not the sole province of the middle class or the social elite,” wrote Davis in his book. Browder set up meetings with those who actually used Big Cypress Swamp — hunters and gladesmen, and Native American tribes.

Browder met with Buffalo Tiger, leader of the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida. According to Davis, the Port Authority had told Tiger that the jetport would be environmentally benign and would not damage their way of life. Besides, any development would bring jobs to the tribe.

But Tiger was skeptical. “It happens to Indians year after year: Progress wasting the hunting grounds,” Tiger told a New York Times reporter at the time.

His skepticism was warranted. At some point during the build, construction equipment had leveled the ceremonial site of the Miccosukee’s Green Corn dance, where every new year, the tribe inducted boys into manhood in a ceremony.

There was one glaring problem with what Browder was bringing to the tribes and the closely linked hunters and gladesmen. The jetport fight was explicitly tied to the protection of Big Cypress Swamp by making it a national park.

But most of the coalition hated the idea. Many felt abused by the creation of Everglades National Park in 1947, which had displaced a fishing village in Flamingo, at the southern tip of the park, and had caused resentment among the Miccosukee, some of whom lived south of Tamiami Trail, in what would become the park.

A national park also would mean the end of hunting and private property in Big Cypress. “These people were from old, old families, some of them going back to the 1860s after the Civil War, when they came down to this country,” Adams said. “They said, ‘You know, we’ve got our family cabins, retreats on the Big Cypress now, and if it becomes a national park, we’re going to lose all those.”

The parties came up with a solution; Big Cypress could be a preserve, not a national park. A preserve — the first ever in the U.S. — meant hunters could still hunt, swamp buggies could still roll through the sawgrass prairies and airboats could still zip over sawgrass.

Those with hunting camps could keep them. It also meant its mineral rights could still be sold by the Collier family, which is why there are several active oil rigs in the preserve.

“Nat Reed and Joe Browder got with them,” said Adams, with Browder arguing that if you don’t push back on the jetport, “there’ll be a Kmart out there where you park your swamp buggy. You’re going to lose one way or the other.”

But they needed a guarantee that they’d be able to keep their hunting camps and the right to hunt and use swamp buggies and air boats. They got it, and eventually began to see the light, said Adams.

Not everyone was on board. Adams said advocates for Big Cypress National Preserve had their tires slashed, and he and a friend had to sneak out the back door of a bar near Everglades City when a pack of locals threatened them.

Johnny Jones, a plumber and hunter from Hialeah, would become a cultural connector and savvy teammate. He led the 50,000-member Florida Wildlife Federation, which was filled with hunters. Airboat and swamp buggy groups also joined in. A jetport alone might not ruin their hunting grounds, but the ensuing development would end the world they loved so much.

“Like many of us, he started seeing a lot of these special places ditched and diked and drained by the Army Corps of Engineers, the water management districts, so he got involved,” Adams said.

Jones’ involvement, his connections in Tallahassee and his ability to cajole, became invaluable, Adams said. “Big Cypress and stopping the jetport wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t come around.”

Beers, gators and an unexpected friend

Even with Reed at the governor’s ear, it became clear that to overcome the Goliaths, Browder, Reed, Adams and Jones would need friends in higher places than Miami or Tallahassee. Alligators, fittingly, were the conduit.

Florida outlawed alligator hunting in 1962, but poaching was still a livelihood in the swamps. Enforcement was tough. The plight of the reptiles garnered national attention, and when the Nixon administration put their finger to the wind of public opinion, it caught their attention, too.

The new interior secretary, an Alaskan car dealer named Walter Hickel, made an “on-the-spot investigation” into poaching a priority.

While on his Florida adventure in 1969, Hickel voyaged deep into the Ten Thousand Islands section of Everglades National Park with Gov. Kirk and others, and played “poacher” as rangers chased him by boat through the mangroves. Amid the camaraderie, Hickel promised to beef up alligator protection, and he and Kirk talked about the jetport.

In spring of 1969, Hickel was “determined not to lose a park to the roughshod behavior of another agency or department, local or federal, and they had powerful allies in Congress,” wrote Davis.

The Senate held hearings to reconcile the jetport conflict, and commissioned a study on how the jetport would impact Everglades National Park, which was downstream. Environmental impact studies are normal today, but it was a relatively new concept at the time.

At the June 1969 hearings on Capitol Hill, the study stated, “Development of the proposed jetport and its attendant facilities will lead to land drainage and development for agriculture, transportation, and services in the Big Cypress Swamp, which will inexorably destroy the south Florida ecosystem and thus the Everglades National Park.”

Boom. Committee members came out against the jetport, with scientific backing for their stance.

“Once that report came out … I think that was the major turning point,” Adams said. “Because that was pure science, peer-reviewed. It was irrefutable, and that’s when the Port Authority got nervous.”

Davis wrote that the deputy director of the Port Authority, Richard Judy, was defiant, though, stating that regardless of what the study reported, “We’re going to build the jetport.”

But then Gov. Kirk, relying heavily on Reed’s advice, decided against the jetport as well, recommending an alternative site in Palm Beach County. With nowhere to turn, the Port Authority relented.

Two years later, Big Cypress National Preserve was established and the larger Everglades system as we know it today was protected.

This was a period where the U.S. was essentially inventing environmental regulation as we know it. President Nixon, as ethically challenged as he was, signed the Endangered Species Act into law on Dec. 28, 1973. The jetport study became a model for federal requirements, according to Davis, and the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency started enforcing the equally new Clean Air Act.

“That was kind of the tail end of the development-at-any-cost mentality in Florida, coming off the post-war boom and the invention of air conditioning,” Jewett said.

“Much of the environmental protection of America came about in the 1960s and ’70s,” Jewett said. “It wasn’t easy. We had pitched political battles.”

The fight over the jetport was one of those battles, and it drastically altered what South Florida looks like today.

The fight today

While recently visiting the detention site, President Donald Trump raved about Alligator Alcatraz. Wilton Simpson, Florida’s agriculture commissioner, accompanied Trump on the tour and lavished him with praise, stating, “We are grateful for your leadership. … God had a plan for us, and it was Donald Trump.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has advised other states to follow Florida’s model. And the Florida GOP is so pleased with the site that they’ve got “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise for sale online.

DeSantis has painted protests over Alligator Alcatraz as partisan nonsense, dismissing environmental concerns by saying there will be “zero” impact, and implying that those opposed are merely left-wingers using the Everglades “as a pretext just for the fact that they oppose immigration enforcement.”

Outdoorsman Mike Elfenbein would beg to differ. He’s the executive director for the Cypress Chapter of the Izaak Walton League and has been hunting deer and turkey, fishing, off-roading and camping in the Big Cypress for most of his life. He praised both Trump and DeSantis for their work on Everglades restoration, which is why the detention center makes no sense to him.

“I think it’s in a really bad place (for the detention center),” he said. “The Cypress chapter of the Izaak Walton League was created with the express purpose of advocating for the creation of Big Cypress National Preserve and not developing the jetport.

“The agreement back then in the ’70s was that that land was not going to be used or impacted beyond what had already happened, and it would be open for recreational use and for its ecological value … forever. This is contrary to that agreement.” Elfenbein said the center needs to be in a different place, and suggested Homestead Air Reserve Base.

“Alligator” Ron Bergeron, the colorful conservationist who sits on the board of the South Florida Water Management District and who once considered running for governor as a Republican, is also against the detention center.

His foundation released a statement that looked back to the jetport fight. “Our founder, Alligator Ron Bergeron, was one of the original Gladesmen in the 1970s who joined with Tribal leaders, conservationists, hunters, anglers, and scientists to fight the original jetport proposal and protect this sacred landscape.”

The Bergeron statement suggested alternative sites such as Camp Blanding or the Homestead Air Reserve Base. “These locations offer existing infrastructure, greater security, and far less ecological risk. Unlike the proposed site, these alternatives would not threaten imperiled wildlife … or directly impact the Miccosukee Tribe, who live on this land and depend on its health for their way of life.”

Elfenbein attended the first protest of the then-pending detention center. “There were all kinds of people there; there were hunters, there were sportsmen, there were MAGA guys, there were, you know, ultra-liberal folks. There was every walk of life.”

He said the upset over the detention center is much like what happened in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “People from all walks of life, from all political persuasions and cultural lineage and race and creed or color, everybody agreed on one thing, that this place was too important to destroy. … This (detention center) is the opposite of that.”

As for DeSantis’ idea that those opposed to the center are merely opposed to immigration enforcement, “I don’t agree with that,” Elfenbein said. “I would tell you this is not a left-wing or a right-wing (issue). This is every wing.”

On June 27, environmental groups, including Friends of the Everglades, the nonprofit founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas during the fight to stop the original jetport, filed a federal lawsuit to halt activity at the site to allow time for an environmental impact study, something required by federal law.

“Lawsuits could slow it down or stop it,” said Jewett. “Whether they will is another story. It depends on which court it goes to. On the state level it seems unlikely. Ideologically they lean to DeSantis.”

Then there’s public opinion. “Public opinion is something that politicians still care about. If there was a big uprising in public opinion and it became more clear that a strong majority of Floridians, including a healthy percentage of Republicans, were against this, then maybe it would be rethought.”

Jewett said one example was the “state park fiasco” of 2025, in which a plan, backed by the DeSantis administration, to build golf courses and large hotels in state parks was leaked to the news media. Social media drove a bipartisan resistance so vocal that the plan blew up in the DeSantis administration’s face, and a bill, signed by DeSantis in May, was passed to make such developments illegal in state parks.

“Alligator Alcatraz is a travesty,” Adams said. “It’s going to do damage — if we have a major hurricane this summer, that thing is not going to stand there and all, with the sewage and chemicals. And they’re going to have to spray for mosquitoes, which is not allowed in the Big Cypress or the National Park.” (State officials have said structures at Alligator Alcatraz can withstand a hurricane of up to Category 2, and if an approaching storm were stronger, then the site would be evacuated.)

Davis’ research revealed that in a 1970 New York Times article about the end of the jetport saga, Buffalo Tiger said, “You can’t make it. You can’t buy it. And when it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

Adams said he knows younger conservationists who are despondent over the current state of environmental fights: The Trump administration recently declared that the new purpose of the Environmental Protection Agency is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.” And the administration has worked to weaken the Clean Water Act and neuter the habitat protection powers of the Endangered Species Act.

Adams said his experience with the jetport taught him lessons. “Don’t let go,” he said. “Don’t stop. What’s worse, picking up the morning paper and seeing what the bastards are doing, and just complaining and bitching about it? Or getting involved? If we don’t, we’ll be overrun.”

Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6. 

Results of a new CU Boulder study show high levels of contaminants such as organic carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen can remain in water for years after a fire.

“We don’t really know too much as a field about the lingering effects of wildfires on water quality,” said Carli Brucker, lead author and former CU Boulder doctoral student. “One surprising thing was definitely seeing that some of these contaminants had significantly elevated concentrations even eight years after the wildfires.”

The researchers from CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences collected more than 100,000 water samples from 500 watershed sites in Colorado and across the western United States. About half of the watersheds where samples were collected were places where a wildfire had already burned, and the other half were untouched by a wildfire.

CU Boulder professor, CIRES fellow and study co-author Ben Livneh said the team sampled up and down the Front Range, including in the Poudre River.

“We were really wanting to know what the impact of wildfires on our water quality and typically how long does that impact last,” Livneh said.

Livneh said prior studies have shown that water quality changes in the immediate aftermath of a fire, but not a lot is known about the impacts on water quality multiple years after a fire. Additionally, those studies looked at specific locations rather than across state lines. Livneh said a big part of their goal was to compile a large data set.

“We knew there might be more to this story,” Livneh said. “There’s a mystery of how long does it last.”

Impacts to water quality, the study found, were worse in more forested areas and in areas where the fire burned closer to the main stem of the river.

Overall, the results showed that wildfires on average impact deeper layers of soil, burn larger vegetative structures and disrupt nutrient cycles to a greater extent than previously suspected, according to the study. This can have negative implications for people’s drinking water and freshwater systems.

Livneh said this is important for water suppliers and utility companies to know so they can better prepare and respond to wildfires. He added that organizations may reconsider their type of water treatment plan to use and whether water treatment needs to continue further into the future than a year or two.

“The biggest implications of these wildfires are for our water utilities,” Brucker said. “For our water utilities, the ones that I’ve talked to, this is already very much a priority … especially around Boulder and other wildfire-prone areas. I think my advice to community members in Boulder is to really just listen to your local water utilities. They have a lot of plans in place to deal with these impacts, and they’re going to ensure we’re always safe from these contaminants.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people.

Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark. Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it. At the time, the White House said NASA would house the reports to comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, which the space agency said it planned to do.

But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans.

“The USGCRP (the government agency that oversees and used to host the report) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data,” NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. That means no data from the assessment or the government science office that coordinated the work will be on NASA, she said.

On July 3, NASA put out a statement that said: “All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring continuity of reporting.”

“This document was written for the American people, paid for by the taxpayers, and it contains vital information we need to keep ourselves safe in a changing climate, as the disasters that continue to mount demonstrate so tragically and clearly,” said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She is chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and co-author of several past national climate assessments.

Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s library and the latest report and its interactive atlas can be seen here.

Former Obama White House science adviser and climate scientist John Holdren accused the administration of outright lying and long intended to censor or bury the reports.

“The new stance is classic Trump administration misdirection,” Holdren said. “In this instance, the administration offers a modest consolation to quell initial outrage over the closure of the globalchange.gov site and the disappearance of the National Climate Assessments. Then, two weeks later, they snatch away the consolation with no apology.”

“They simply don’t want the public to see the meticulously assembled and scientifically validated information about what climate change is already doing to our farms, forests, and fisheries, as well as to storms, floods, wildfires, and coast property — and about how all those damages will grow in the absence of concerted remedial action,” Holdren said in an email.

That’s why it’s important that state and local governments and every day people see these reports, Holdren said. He said they are written in a way that is “useful to people who need to understand what climate change is doing and will do to THEM, their loved ones, their property and their environment.”

“Trump doesn’t want people to know,” Holdren wrote.

The most recent report, issued in 2023, found that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority communities, particularly Native Americans, often disproportionately at risk.

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