The small town of Carrboro (population: roughly 21,000) is suing Duke Energy, which according to an analysis from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the third largest source of carbon dioxide in the United States. Carbon dioxide is one of the chief anthropogenic greenhouse gases that contributes to climate change; the others are methane, water vapor, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases. These gases are mostly emitted through humanity’s use of fossil fuels, as well as other agricultural and industrial activities.
In a complaint filed Wednesday in North Carolina state court, the community led by Mayor Barbara Foushee is asking a jury to award the town money for current and future losses because of climate change.
“North Carolina has just suffered its hottest year on record, and temperatures for the region may increase as much as 6° to 10° F by the end of the century,” the complaint states. “In the next decade alone, temperatures in Carrboro are likely to be over 90° F for more than 10 weeks a year.” The complaint added that climate change causes more frequent and extreme rain and storms, citing Hurricane Helene as having “devastated communities in Western North Carolina.”
Carrboro is following in the example of other communities that are trying to hold companies legally accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions. In May, Vermont became the first state to require oil companies to compensate the public for damages caused by climate change. There are also lawsuits from Bucks County, Penn. to Chicago regarding greenhouse gas emissions, as well as related litigation pertaining to plastic pollution from California to Ford County, Kansas.
Before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became a top science adviser to Donald Trump — a once-and-future president who openly denies environmental science — the dynastic New York lawyer was such a prominent environmentalist that he literally became a “waterkeeper,” someone dedicated to conserving natural bodies of water from pollution. For more than 20 years, Kennedy helped lead the “Waterkeeper Alliance” he co-founded until leaving in 2020 to “devote himself” to vaguely defined “other issues.” That story ended, as the world now knows, with Kennedy launching a third-party 2024 Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona before dropping out at a critical moment to endorse Trump.
One of Kennedy’s fellow waterkeepers, Diane Wilson, 76, remembers the evolution in Kennedy’s personality as he shifted from environmentalist to conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter. In 2019, she won a $50 million lawsuit against a Taiwanese plastics company called Formosa Plastics Corporation, Waterkeeper v. Formosa, and Kennedy reached out to congratulate her and to offer his future support.
“Bobby called me a number of times when I won that, and he told me how much he liked and admired me,” Wilson told Salon. As Kennedy began to move to the right, however, his personality changed. “Not too long ago, but before he went over to Trump, he called me up in the middle of the night. I was asleep, it was like midnight here, and he asked me if I would be an elector [for the Electoral College] and said he needed someone he could trust. He did that twice in the middle of the night.”
Wilson said yes because she believed in Kennedy’s passion for the environment, and Kennedy later said he would look for a lawyer to help her in a New Jersey case where she and three others had been arrested for blocking Formosa Plastics Corporation entrance gates.
“He said give him two weeks,” Wilson said. “He never called back.” Later he endorsed Trump. (Kennedy did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment.)
Now the original so-called “waterkeeper” is preparing to work for a president who plans on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As millions of Americans despair for Earth’s future, Wilson has advice for those who still want to protect the planet: If people have the confidence and work ethic to educate themselves with reliable scientific sources, and also possess faith that even the most conservative Trump supporters can change their minds, they will make a meaningful difference.
She speaks from experience. That is how Wilson held Formosa Plastics Corporation accountable for polluting the bay in her multigenerational Texas community, Calhoun County, with a population under 20,000. Unlike Kennedy, Wilson undertook her crusade without the advantages of inherited wealth. She is a fourth-generation fisherwoman, one whose skills as a shrimp boat captain were so undeniable that she became indispensable in an industry filled with casual sexism. Wilson has a track record of taking on powerful polluters and winning. In 1994, she successfully advocated for “zero discharge” agreements from Formosa and the aluminum manufacturer Alcoa to stop liquid effluent pollution. She was also prominently involved in protests for victims of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the 1984 Union Carbide leak.
Even more impressively, she did all of these things with nothing but a high school education while living on $475 a month. Her most prized possessions seem to be her intellect and work ethic.
“I would get information,” Wilson recalled when discussing her work in Waterkeeper v. Formosa. Sometimes employees at Formosa gave her documents so she could figure out what was going on inside the plant. Other times she visited the bay and engaged in her own down-and-dirty research. Even though her obsession caused her to lose her job, her marriage, her house, her boat and many personal relationships, Wilson enthusiastically educated herself on chemistry, ecology and every other necessary branch of science. She was similarly energetic in learning about the law.
She found that plastics contain dangerous chemicals like ethylene chloride and vinyl chloride, which Formosa was leaking into the water. Plastics in general, Wilson discovered, contain toxins like phthalates and bisphenols, which can be dangerous when humans ingest them. They have been linked to diseases from cancer and respiratory diseases to infertility and yet, they are unavoidable, contaminating everything from air to water to food.
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Thanks to Wilson’s ground work, in 2019 the Supreme Court found Formosa’s irresponsible practices violated the Clean Water Act. America’s most powerful bench deemed that Formosa had to improve its wastewater and stormwater discharge facilities, and the State of Texas had to create a Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust to support environmental projects. The company was additionally required to pay $50 million to the community it had polluted.
Wilson achieved all of this first by learning science from reliable sources. Her approach was best embodied by her work collecting thousands of plastic pellets in the bay that had been dumped there by Formosa. She did it one at a time, patiently, and fact-checking her work every step of the way.
“I got as close to the real events that were happening as possible,” Wilson said. “If you’re looking for scientific stuff, you go to the studies. You read the studies. You don’t just take an article and read that. You go to the primary sources.” Once she had all of the evidence she needed, she filed a citizen’s clean water suit. Between the thousands of samples and the airtight legal case, Wilson prevailed.
Wilson was able to protect her community, but in the larger scheme, the world is overrun with pollution. These problems must be fixed on a global level, not a local one. That is daunting — but director Fax Bahr and producer CC Goldwater, who are in post-production on a documentary about Wilson’s life called “Waterkeeper,” believe spreading her message will help. All three have the chops to make it happen: Wilson has already been the subject of a 2005 documentary about her early environmentalist work, “Texas Gold.” Bahr co-directed the acclaimed 1991 documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” about the creation of the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now.” Finally Goldwater famously produced the 2006 documentary “Mr. Conservative” about her grandfather, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and the widely acknowledged founding father of modern American conservatism.
Bahr, Goldwater and Wilson have already found people willing to help with their new project.
“We had reluctance from a lot of people when we went out for financing, so we really pulled up our boots strings and did it on our own,” Goldwater said. “Then we had a lot of gracious people that gave us money.”
Bahr added that, because they are “beholden to no one,” they do not fear retaliation. They can share this story without being restrained by backers.
“We’re going to take this thing out into the community,” Bahr promised. “We’re going to show this film at community screenings. We’re going to have Diane speak, if she’s got the bandwidth to do it. It’s community organizing.”
In addition to raising the film’s profile, however, the biggest challenge facing the makers of “Waterkeeper” is that millions of people deny environmental science for political reasons. But Wilson believes, based on her experience winning the Formosalawsuit, that many of these minds can be changed. Environmental activists just have to make it clear that conservatives don’t have to be “environmentalists” to support their causes. They simply need to share the same moral values.
“The workers that I work with, the fishermen that I work with, the ranchers that I work with, they are all Republicans,” Wilson said. “When I was talking to the workers who were out there helping me get the pellets out of the bay, they would say, ‘I’m no tree-hugger, but I care about the bay,’ or ‘I’m no tree-hugger, but I care about the children.’ I think the people on the bottom, there was a commonality with the bay and the children and their community.”
This does not mean people changed their minds politically; Calhoun County voted overwhelmingly for Trump in all three of his campaigns. Wilson admits to being frustrated by this, but points to the objective reality that many Trump supporters still supported her efforts to protect their natural resources. Some even joke about it.
“I’ve got a guy who’s helping me on a boat, and he takes me down the river and is checking out Dow Chemical,” Wilson said. “After a while he just turned around and said, ‘Diane, you’re a Democrat. Get off my boat!’ It’s a big joke, and then he just laughs. I know there is stuff out there in DC, and I just can’t even imagine it. But in the work that I do, we do the work and we have a commonality.”
Extrapolated to the scale of national and international politics, Wilson anticipates the same result: People who experience hardships due to pollution will ultimately stand by their community, even if they stubbornly stick to their political convictions.
“They’re living right next to that plant!” Wilson said, recalling the logic of her Trump-supporting friend. “They may be Republicans, but they’re the ones who are suffering from all of the pollution that’s coming out of there.”
It wasn’t just pollution that challenged Wilson. She overcame other obstacles, such as the multiple ways in which her sex was used against her. With the shrimp fishermen, she encountered sexism and was sometimes told having a woman on a boat was “bad luck,” but she eventually earned her colleagues’ respect by proving her aptitude. The misogyny she experienced when fighting Big Plastic, by contrast, was far more intense. She was called a lesbian, a whore, a bad mother, hysterical, a crazy woman.
“Oh God, they would call her ‘girl,’” Goldwater said, adding that class and education were also held against Wilson by her opponents. Amy Blanchett, a senior communications representative at Formosa Plastics, told Salon that the company “takes allegations of this nature very seriously, as they do not align with our values of professionalism, respect and integrity.” They added that “to our knowledge, Formosa Plastics has never referred to Ms. Wilson in a derogatory manner, nor have we made any statements similar to those described in your inquiry.” (Regarding the legacy of the 2019 lawsuit, Formosa Plastics referred Salon to a video claiming a commitment to environmental responsibility.)
If Wilson can defend the environment despite the odds stacked against her as an impoverished Texas fisherwoman, Goldwater and Bahr believe anyone can.
“That’s really the whole reason for doing this film,” Bahr said. “I interviewed a bunch of Waterkeepers before choosing to go with Diane’s story, and it’s because with absolutely nothing, zero resources, a high school education, living on $475 bucks a month, she did it alone. She brought to account one of the largest petrochemical manufacturers on the planet.”
He added, “That’s what people can do.”
The filmmakers hope that people who see or hear Wilson’s story will be inspired to be proactive in environmental issues in their own backyards. Producer C.C. Goldwater observed that Kennedy is proof of how people can evolve on these issues, albeit not always for the better. When editing a 2007 reedition of her grandfather’s famous 1960 manifesto, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” she included a Kennedy essay in which the then-Waterkeeper argued Republicans had become too extreme. Goldwater speculated that Kennedy may still recognize the importance of environmentalism, but in order to work with Trump is deliberately setting those values aside.
“I don’t think that Bobby has gone away from being an environmentalist, I really don’t,” Goldwater said. “But I think he’s gotten off track a bit to go to the Republican Party with a president like we have.”
Venus, the second planet from our Sun, vividly demonstrates why the greenhouse effect makes life impossible. With an average surface temperature of roughly 1000º F (500º C) under a toxic atmosphere primarily composed of thick carbon dioxide, no lifeform known to inhabit our third planet from the Sun can dwell on its neighbor. Yet scientists hypothesized that although Venus is likely uninhabitable today, it may have been hospitable in its ancient history.
Yet a recent study in the journal Nature Astronomy strongly suggests Venus was always hostile to life. Scientists from the University of Cambridge looked at data from past probes to the second planet to learn about the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere. Regular volcanic activity on the planet keeps the Venusian innards churning outward into the atmosphere, allowing astronomers to analyze their chemical composition for gases like carbon dioxide, carbonyl sulphide and — most importantly in terms of finding life — liquid water.
Volcanic eruptions from Earth mainly produce steam because our planet has a water-rich interior. Yet Venus, by contrast, has volcanic gases containing, at most, six percent water, making it unlikely to contain lifeforms like those on Earth.
“Even though it’s the closest planet to us, Venus is important for exoplanet science because it gives us a unique opportunity to explore a planet that evolved very differently to ours, right at the edge of the habitable zone,” team leader Tereza Constantinou, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, said in a statement.
The search for life on Venus has turned up other dead ends. In 2020, the astronomy world was roused at the prospect of phosphine, a gas associated with anaerobic bacteria, after it was seemingly detected in the Venusian atmosphere. However, a pair of subsequent studies determined that it was merely a false positive, which one scientist later explained indicates that the scientific process is working as it is supposed to.
“It’s exactly how science should work,” Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, told Science News at the time. “It’s too early to say one way or the other what this detection means for Venus.”
Plastic pollution is choking the planet. From the bottom of the Mariana trench to the top of Mount Everest, there is little escaping the problem. Regardless, treaty negotiations to end plastic pollution collapsed on Sunday after the event in Busan, South Korea closed without the nations firmly agreeing to put limits on plastic production.
Despite closed-door talks that stretched through the weekend, the draft of the treaty released on Sunday afternoon left the question of future regulations to be settled in a later open session. The negotiators did not establish any proposal to limit production, instead promising to set a target at a later conference and including an option to entirely drop the idea.
The world produces more than 400 million metric tons of plastic each year, with plastic production expected to rise roughly 70% by 2040 at the existing rate. Plastic pollutionis regardedas aserious issueby scientists because the synthetic polymers used in plastic can take centuries to break down. Even worse for the environment, many of these products include chemicals that are dangerous to human health. Endocrine disruptors like phthalates and bisphenols are linked to health conditions like cancer, infertility and cardiovascular diseases. Plastics have been found in the food we eat, the water we drink, in the blood flowing through our veins and in the breastmilk which nourishes children.
That is why, in the lead up to the Busan conference, scientists and activists alike joined nations led by Norway and Rwanda in a campaign to significantly reduce plastic pollution. Even though the most recent attempt at a treaty fell apart, those present insist there is still a chance for reform in the future.
“The progress we have made is real,” South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul said in a statement. “Compromise is not a sign of weakness … We cannot allow perfection to become the enemy of progress.”
Another delegate who proposed a global target to cut down plastic production contradicted Tae-yul, characterizing the talks as a “moral failure.”
“Colleagues, we didn’t accept a weak treaty here, and we never will,” Panama’s Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez said in a statement. “To the 120 nations standing for ambition, I say: Let us be relentless. We may have been delayed, but we will not be stopped.”
Climate change denial is often seen as a mainstay of the political right, as leaders like President-elect Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson ignore or contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are cooking our only planet. It wasn’t always this way, of course — Republicans were once moderate stewards of the environment, with presidents like Richard Nixon passing progressive environmental laws. Now our global ecosystem crisis is often dismissed by conservatives as a “hoax” while doing nothing to stop drilling for oil or subsidizing fossil fuel companies.
But not everyone on the right denies climate change is a real and growing threat. Indeed, many people not only agree with the scientific consensus, they have used climate change as an excuse to push white supremacist ideologies and lash out against immigration. This phenomenon is far from new.
Experts tell Salon that environmentalist politics and the politics of the far right have long intertwined, from eugenics and other pseudoscience of the early 20th century to white nationalism and fascism today.
The word “ecofascism” is used to describe these movements, although all of the scholars agree that it should be employed carefully. Few people explicitly call themselves “ecofascist,” yet an umbrella term is useful when describing the ideologies of those who accept the basic facts of environmental science — namely, that human activity is capable of drastically altering the planet for the worse, at least in terms of our ability to inhabit it — and use those facts as the premise for radical right-wing political conclusions.
“Different strands of neo-Malthusian and social Darwinian thinking have sought to incorporate environmental concerns, often by emphasizing logics of scarcity and competition,” William A. Callison, a lecturer in social studies at Harvard University and a member of the Zetkin Collective, a group of scholars and activists working on the political ecology of the far right, told Salon. Neo-Malthusian refers to the concepts of economist Thomas Malthus, who argued against human overpopulation in the 18th century; social Darwinism is a misapplication of biologist Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to validate conservative social hierarchies.
“These logics oppose nations or peoples to a racialized threat — enemies from without or within — that are said to consume or despoil the resources that belong to the natives,” Callison added. Sometimes these arguments are presented through dog whistles, such as the 1968 essay by ecologist Garret Harden called “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which is taught in economics classes to explain the dangers of overconsumption of resources because it lacked explicit racism.
“There are ways that the climate crisis can intensify these logics, even while drawing from climate denialist discourses,” Callison said.
Even beloved historical figures succumbed to extreme right-wing conclusions. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of America’s most consequential progressive leaders, in no small part because of his vigorous support for conservation, including jumpstarting the national park system. Yet he also supported eugenics, or the pseudoscience of controlling human reproduction to ensure that genetic traits deemed desirable are passed on.
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In some ways, Roosevelt was a product of his time. The early 20th century more broadly was the heyday of ecofascism, with fascists in Europe embracing the ideas of Malthus and Darwin to argue that supposedly “inferior” races (Jews, Africans, Romani, Slavs and many others) deserved to be oppressed, even exterminated. According to Alexander Menrisky, an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut who has written about the intersection of environmentalism and fascism, the marriage of American conservationist movements with eugenics led to the passage of at least three racially motivated immigration-restriction bills.
“The association between eugenics and early U.S. environmentalism isn’t as strange as it might seem at a glance,” Merinsky said, referring to the popularity of the 1916 eugenics tome “The Passing of the Great Race” by anthropologist Madison Grant. It proved to be “one of the fountainheads of what is today called ‘replacement theory,’ or the notion that non-white peoples (and liberal governments) are actively conspiring to replace white populations.”
From here, one can draw a direct connection between the environmentalism-cum-xenophobia of these early 20th century eugenicists and modern ecofascism. Some extremists on the right have gone on shooting sprees targeting certain minority people and will link their concerns about immigration to a belief that they are protecting the environment. This was the case for the white nationalist killers of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand; Latinos in El Paso, Texas; Jews in Pittsburgh; and socialists in Norway. After a 2022 massacre in Buffalo, New York targeting a predominantly Black supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three others, authorities found a manifesto ranting that “white birth rates must change” and that the “natural environment” has become “industrialized, pulverized and commoditized.” Cribbing from the Christchurch manifesto, the shooter says “there is no conservatism without nature, there is no nationalism without environmentalism … The protection and preservation of these lands is of the same importance as the protection and preservation of our own ideals and beliefs.”
The El Paso shooter, Patrick Crusius, expressed similar views in his own screed. Dubbing it “An Inconvenient Truth” in a seeming nod to Vice President Al Gore’s classic 2006 documentary about climate change, Crusius said that “water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted.” He argued new immigrants would only consume more, worsening Americans’ standard of living and environmental conditions “Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land,” he continued. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
The Great Replacement Theory has been endorsed by Elon Musk, Trump and other conservatives from former Fox News pundits to members of Congress. These ideologies are helped by generous funding from industries which benefit from their spread. The fossil fuel industry, for example, has a history of promoting climate change denial while proposing solutions to climate change that do not involve phasing out fossil fuels. Daniele Conversi, a political historian and social theorist at the University of the Basque Country who has studied ecofascism, underscored how these wealthy special interests and their ideologies pose a major threat by obscuring uncomfortable scientific truths and channeling popular attention elsewhere.
“For instance, Trumpism has substantially contributed to spreading a dangerous lack of trust not only in science and political institutions but in human achievements in general,” Conversi said, “And all of this, while identifying easy targets who are not responsible for the coming catastrophe.”
In fact, instead of referring to the modern movement as “ecofascism,” Conversi prefers the term “fossil fascism.”
“As the far-right has a lot to gain from the loss and suffering of others, Trump-style forms of ‘fossil fascism’ are rapidly emerging as a mixture of ultranationalism, deception, disinformation, repeated lies, othering and eventually warmongering — all of which has characterized fascism throughout history,” Conversi said. That term describes the true inner dynamics of the fascist movement that wears the clothing of environmentalism among the far right.
“Eco-fascism is a neoliberal and far-right meme that has experienced a revival in the blogosphere and other forms of writing, but not so much in real politics,” Conversi said. “It is not historically or empirically grounded, as the environmental components of fascism were quite limited.”
For his part, Callison views the modern fascists as reincarnations of their Nazi counterparts from nearly a century prior.
“The threats of this ideology can be seen in how Nazism made ecofascism an official part of its program,” Callison said. “In fact, it was the first regime to pass a Klimaschutz (climate protection) law, which is now a dominant and rather neutral frame in German environmental discourse. Ecofascism centered on the Blut and Boden — blood and soil — as constitutive of Germanness.” He added that “many far-right parties use this nationalist equation of culture and nature to gain popularity. Marine Le Pen is a prime example in France, Tucker Carlson in the United States. The claim is that migrants or foreign species that do not value the environment, and thus pollute and consume it at the expense of natives.”
Importantly, these modern ideologies — ecofascist or fossil fascist — have never been effective at actually addressing the environmental issues their adherents claim to value. Take El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who has been accused of flirting with fascism. Bukele promised to strengthen environmental regulations when taking office in 2019, but has instead gutted the nation’s environmental agencies to the point of virtual non-existence. Elon Musk, who has been tapped by Trump as one of his top economic advisers, has also suggested similar policies for the United States.. By contrast another Musk ally, Argentina’s president Javier Milei, has always been openly anti-environmentalist, which is convenient for Musk as his company Tesla relies on Argentina’s mines for lithium.
“The ideology has not yet been important in addressing climate change,” Callison said. “But it has been an important way for some European far-right parties to gain ground, and an alternative form of ‘greenwashing’ — gesturing at environmental concerns while distracting from the real sources and solutions to the climate crisis.”
Ecofascism may sound appealing, at least on a superficial level, for people who are sincerely interested in protecting the planet. Yet the existential crises facing our species — climate change, plastic pollution, the eradication of species — can only be solved through realistic solutions, like reducing emissions and protecting old growth forests. “Green” movements that purport to fight address these issues but ignore the science to attack marginalized, often poor communities are just as much a threat to humanity as rising temperatures.
Now the original so-called “waterkeeper” is preparing to work for a president who 
Wilson was able to protect her community, but in the larger scheme, the world is overrun with pollution. These problems must be fixed on a global level, not a local one. That is daunting — but director Fax Bahr and producer CC Goldwater, who are in post-production on a documentary about Wilson’s life called