Dear Reader,

Happy end of Q3! Like the U.S. federal government, our new fiscal year begins on October 1st. You will hear more about our FY 2027 Budget in a future The Roots issue.

Here are this week’s top stories on the world’s most pressing health and environmental disparities:

Best regards,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor

💥 ICYMI: Russian drone hits National Academy of Sciences building in central Kyiv, causing fire

Ukrinform, the state news agency of Ukraine, reported Monday that a Russian drone has struck the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv, causing a fire.

Last month, we published a dispatch from KC on her visit to one of the research groups housed within the complex, which studies fungi across the country. Read more here.

🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• MUSCOGEE COUNTY, Ga. — Columbus landowner fights part of 291-mile, $3.2 billion Southern Company gas pipeline (Kala Hunter, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer)

  Peek later learned Lane is an employee of Southern Company as a plant manager at Plant Franklin next to Goat Rock Dam in Alabama and Plant Addision in Upson County. The proposed SSE4 pipeline is owned in a 50/50 split by Kinder Morgan and Southern Company.

• NAGS HEAD, N.C. — In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life (Carolyn Y. Johnson, The New York Times)

  “We’ll always be doing this stuff; it’s part of who I am,” said Dr. [Julia] Van Etten, who is setting her lab up at the University of Maryland this fall. “My little project here has big implications for evolutionary biology. Think of it: if more people were doing this, how many things we’d be learning about the planet and our health and where we came from.”

• CANCER ALLEY, La. — Death by Data Centers (Dorothy Slater, Dissent)

  Tech companies like Meta want us to believe that the AI boom is inevitable, and we all might as well get on board. But I’m a nurse, and my job is to advocate for my patients. Even without these new data centers, Louisiana has seen enough death and destruction.

• FROSTPROOF, Fla. — The Race to Save Florida Orange Industry From Total Collapse (paywalled) (Julie Wernau and Zack Wittman, The Wall Street Journal)

• CENTRAL FLORIDA — Dengue fever outbreak prompts Florida counties to declare state of emergency (Victoria Bekiempis, The Guardian)

🟠 TRACKING TRUMP

• Decades of fossil fuel influence paved way for Trump’s assault on university research, study says (Sara Sneath, The Guardian)

  “In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures and centralized political control,” said [Noel Healy, of Salem State University, the lead author of the study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.] “Universities came under attack before those governments had full control, not after.”

• U.S. Rejects U.N. Declaration on Preparing for Future Pandemics (Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times)

  In his opening comments, Khalilur Rahman, the president of the General Assembly, said that to consider pandemic preparedness beyond the remit of the United Nations “would be a fallacy.”

  “The charter and the United Nations were designed precisely to tackle global challenges for which no single isolated response can suffice,” Dr. Rahman, a Bangladeshi economist, said.

• California rules on air pollution from ships under challenge (Tony Briscoe, Los Angeles)

• MCDERMITT CALDERA, Ore. — The Trump Administration’s Critical Minerals Agenda Comes for America’s ‘Forgotten Wildlife Corridor’ (Wyatt Myskow, Johanna Hansel, Carla Samon Ros, Inside Climate News and Columbia Journalism Investigations)

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🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• KAMPUNG SUNGAI TEMON, Malaysia — Seletar aquaculture co-exists with, not harms mangroves (Aidila Razak, Macaranga)

  “The problem with us, the so-called modern, advanced people, is we want to dominate nature,” says [human geographer Dr Jarina Jani].

• PORTLAND, Ore. — Connecting Food Systems at Portland Inaugural Indigenous Food Summit (Nika Bartoo-Smith and Lyric Aquino, Underscore Native News)

  “The hope for me doing stuff like this is just always that people know that they can participate in that reciprocity with our food systems and our medicines, and that they have every right to be in relationship with their prairies and their food forests and all of those wonderful beings that we get to coexist with,” said Emma Johnson, Cowlitz, Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge (ITECK) coordinator at Portland State University who helped organize the summit.

• Half a million trees to be planted in England in three years, says government (Fiona Harvey, The Guardian)

  “The mood could not be more different from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, who presented nature as a block to development,” said [Craig Bennett, the chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts]. “This will be very welcome. For a long time local authorities have been trying to help nature but did not have the power, money or political support. The Burnham government seems to have realised that nature is crucial to the country’s future.”

  • However: UK regulator abandons mandatory climate disclosures for listed companies (Phoebe Seers, Reuters)

• Hong Kong’s changing climate in 7 charts: from quadrupled ‘very hot days’ to record rainfall (Hillary Leung, Hong Kong Free Press)

  Annual hours under the [Hong Kong Observatory]’s “very hot weather warning” have tripled since 2000 – climbing from 464 hours to a peak of over 1,400 hours in 2021.

  Since 2020, heat warnings have been in force for at least 13 per cent of every calendar year. In 2000, it was just over 5 per cent.

• Like Gathering Cattle with a Butterfly Net (Will Grant, Re:Public)

• JUBA, South Sudan — Turning Garbage into Triumphs: How Juba’s Eco-Innovators Build Free Homes for the Poor and Fund School Fees Using Thousands of Plastic Bottles (Kei Emmanuel Duku, InfoNile)

• What Guam Inherited (Anita Hofschneider, Grist, in partnership with The Intercept)

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