Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

Five years on from the publication of the climate fiction book, The Ministry for the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson finds little he would change in his sweeping speculative novel —aside from a regrettable mention of blockchain.

“What I really meant was simply digital money,” he says, dismissing the term’s cryptocurrency baggage.

But the core of the book remains intact: a “cognitive map,” in the author’s words, for navigating the climate crisis and economic upheaval of the 21st century.

In an interview with Mongabay’s podcast host Mike DiGirolamo, Robinson reflects on the story’s enduring relevance. The book, which opens with a catastrophic heat wave in India, has gained renewed resonance as real-world temperatures rise and political volatility deepens. “We are in a science fiction novel that we’re all co-writing together,” he says. “Things are changing so fast.”

A lifelong utopian, Robinson is less concerned with idealized outcomes than with the practical, often fraught process of “getting there.” His work imagines a slow evolution toward “post-capitalism,” a term he uses to describe a more equitable and sustainable political economy. Rather than advocating “degrowth” — which he considers a “spiky, negative, counterproductive name” — Robinson envisions a “growth of goodness,” particularly for the world’s poorest.

His perspective, however, is far from rosy. The book confronts the likelihood of “reversals” — from political backlash to social unrest — and examines how righteous anger can devolve into unproductive violence. Its protagonists, Mary and Frank, represent the uneasy alliance between institutional reform and grassroots resistance. Both are drawn from recognizable archetypes: Mary from real-world figures like Christiana Figueres and Mary Robinson; Frank from the wounded idealists Robinson observes attempting to do good in a broken world.

For Robinson, storytelling is a key battleground in what he calls a “war of ideas.” And books alone won’t win it. He praises platforms like Mongabay for amplifying underreported stories of environmental progress and resilience. “If there were more of those kinds of stories,” he says, “it would be a sign that things were getting better in world history.”

His next project, a nonfiction book on Antarctica, extends Ministry’s influence even further. It explores real-world efforts to preserve ice sheets using methods first imagined in fiction. “We have not lost this fight yet,” Robinson insists. If anything, the enduring interest in his novel suggests the opposite: Stories of change, however imperfect, can help shape a better future.

Banner image: White rhyolite spires on the shores of Jodogahama Beach in Miyako, Japan. These spires are estimated to be around 45 million years old and form a natural version of a Japanese garden. This beach is part of Sanriku Fukkō National Park. It was incorporated into this national park as a reconstruction effort following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Image by Mike DiGirolamo for Mongabay.

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Dozens of Colombian waste pickers inundated Bogota’s iconic Bolivar Square with about 15 tons of recyclable goods Tuesday to protest decreasing income and tougher conditions for scavengers. They collect trash from homes, factories and office buildings and sell it to local recycling plants.

The demonstration was organized by 14 waste picker associations in Bogota, a city where approximately 20,000 scavengers work long hours gathering items like plastic bottles, scrap metal and cardboard boxes. About 100 waste pickers gathered and some pretended to swim in between the mounds of trash.

“We want factories to pay us a fair price for the materials we collect” said Nohra Padilla, the president of Colombia’s National Association of Waste Pickers. “Colombians and their government need to realize that without our work landfills would be saturated.”

Most waste pickers in Colombia work independently, pulling heavy carts and gathering recyclable items that are not collected by local garbage trucks. The trucks, which are run by contractors or municipal governments, focus on gathering organic and nonrecyclable trash.

The income of these waste pickers depends largely on how many kilos of plastic, cardboard or scrap metal they can sell every day to warehouses or local associations, which then sell the material to recycling plants.

Jorge Ospina, the president of the ARAUS waste pickers association, said that over the past two months the price his association gets paid by recycling plants for every kilogram of plastic fell from about 75 U.S. cents to 50 cents. He said he can only afford to pay waste pickers about 25 cents per kilo of plastic they drop off at the ARAUS warehouse in Bogota.

Ospina said imports of fresh plastic from countries including China could be behind the sharp drop in prices.

“We need more government regulation,” he said, warning that if prices fall further waste pickers might no longer be motivated to collect recyclable goods, and landfills in Colombia would “overflow.”

Colombia’s constitution protects waste pickers, who often come from impoverished backgrounds

These trash collectors are prioritized over large contractors when it comes to gathering recyclable goods and in large cities municipal governments are obliged to pay a monthly fee to waste pickers associations that varies in accordance with how many tons of trash each association collects.

But prices for recyclable trash are unstable and Colombian waste pickers also face increasing competition from Venezuelan migrants who are doing the same kind of work in cities like Bogota and Medellin.

Waste pickers in Colombia tend to make less than the national minimum wage of $350 a month.

Reporting by Manuel Rueda and Astrid Suarez, Associated Press 

To the outside world, Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park is a model of successful conservation of wildlife amid declining populations in other parts of Africa. But while elephant, giraffe and buffalo populations have grown as much as sixfold, the people inside the park live with a colonial legacy that restricts both their livelihoods and their access to sacred sites, Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo reported in April.

The national park is a 1,978-square-kilometer (764-square-mile) protected area and among more than 700 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves meant to foster harmony between people and their environments. It’s home to elephants, hippos, big cats and almost 600 bird species, as well as residents of 11 “enclave” towns who are the descendants of the Indigenous Basangora and Bantu people, the region’s precolonial inhabitants, Mukpo wrote.

Katwe, one of the enclave towns, used to be a highly contested area because of its proximity to a volcanic lake and its large salt deposits. It became part of the British protectorate of Uganda after the British East Africa Company captured the town, killing thousands of Basangora.

The locals were forced to give up pastoralism and settle in fishing villages as the British demarcated the savanna into game reserves.

“They created the park without the consent of the people,” Katwe-based tour guide Nicholas Kakongo told Mukpo, “and they cut us off from interacting with the animals.”

While the park has become a valuable asset for Uganda, which is aiming for higher tourism earnings, residents of the enclave towns have suffered under the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s (UWA) enforcement of strict conservation laws. Mukpo has reported on extrajudicial killings allegedly carried out by wildlife rangers.

Locals are also prohibited from visiting sacred sites or gathering firewood and plants for traditional medicine. Women who enter the park to collect firewood have been arrested and jailed. One woman remained in custody for six weeks as her family raised the money to pay her fine. She got sick and died after release.

“We used those sacred sites to guide us in our everyday activities. The system was embedded in our DNA — you can’t just come and stop people from accessing [them],” Kakongo said.

Some conservationists side with the park’s rules, which they say are only being criticized by those with bad intentions.

“We have no wildlife outside of the parks, there’s a tiny amount,” Michael Keigwin, Uganda Conservation Foundation founder, told Mukpo. “The same people who are complaining today [once] removed industrial amounts of meat and ivory outside of Uganda to make profit.”

But for Kakongo, the hope is that sacred relationships between humans and wildlife are rebuilt.

“I‘ve been swimming in that lake for 40 years, I‘ve interacted with hippos there, I‘ve collected firewood in the protected area. I‘ve interacted with the elephants,” he said.

Read the full story here.

Banner image of an elephant in Queen Elizabeth National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

Between 2015 and 2024, global authorities seized 370 metric tons of pangolin scales and 193 metric tons of elephant ivory. The latest report from the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC) suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted trafficking networks, and that the lull has, surprisingly, endured. Seizures plummeted in 2020 and remain far below pre-pandemic highs, with pangolin seizures down 84% from their 2019 peak and ivory seizures down 94%, reports Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman.

“The report was motivated by a need to present up-to-date findings,” said Olivia Swaak-Goldman, WJC’s executive director.

Supply chains fractured as crime bosses were grounded by travel bans. Intelligence-led enforcement intensified, and countries like Nigeria and China began prosecuting kingpins.

Still, fewer seizures do not necessarily mean less trafficking. Some experts believe traffickers are relying on hidden stockpiles or shifting tactics to avoid detection.

“It is possible that trafficking is down because the populations have crashed,” said Susan Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Pangolins, consumed across West and Central Africa and prized in East Asia for their scales, remain the most trafficked mammals. All eight species are threatened with extinction. Ivory, once the commodity of choice, has lost its luster as prices collapsed after China shuttered its domestic market.

Nigeria remains a central export hub, though Angola and Mozambique are rising nodes in the network. Enforcement is improving — Mozambique convicted two major traffickers this year — but critics warn that prosecutions lag behind seizures.

Changing consumer behavior may prove most crucial.

“We need to change the buying,” Lieberman said. “That’s not just hearts and minds; it’s also laws and regulations.”

Swaak-Goldman sees reason for optimism.

“If the current trajectory continues — with strong law enforcement and international cooperation — it may be possible to not only sustain but build on these gains,” she said.

Recovery, though tentative, is within reach.

Read the full story by Spoorthy Raman here.

Banner image: Pangolins are among the most trafficked mammals, poached for their scales. Image by flowcomm via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Nigeria recently proposed a ban on importing solar panels to boost local manufacturing, but some climate and renewable energy experts worry this move may impede the country’s transition to cleaner energy sources.

In announcing the proposed ban on March 26, Nigeria’s Minister of Science and Technology Uche Nnaji said the country has sufficient capacity to meet local solar energy demands through private firms as well as the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure, a Nigerian agency that’s been developing solar technologies.

However, Ogunlade Olamide Martins, an associate director at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation for Africa, a Pan-African NGO, told Mongabay in a voice message that Nigeria’s solar panel production capacity currently remains limited.

Martins said that Nigeria’s largest existing solar panel assembly factory, located in Lagos, has a 100-megawatt (MW) capacity, producing fewer than 72,000 panels annually. This is inadequate for the more than 83 million Nigerians lacking energy access, he added. “We can’t put pressure on local facilities that do not have the capacity.”

By the end of 2024, Nigeria’s total installed solar energy capacity was about 385.7 MWp; the country aims to achieve 500 MW capacity by 2025. Solar panel manufacturing factories with higher capacity are under construction.

Felicia Dairo, project manager at the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development, told Mongabay in a written statement that the immediate consequence of the proposed ban will be scarcity in solar panels. “And we all know what happens when supply drops: Prices shoot up. The average household or small business looking to go solar will face higher costs, making it an unaffordable luxury for many.”

She added this could push people toward fossil fuel. “When solar becomes too expensive, people and businesses will have no choice but to fall back on fossil fuels, generators, petrol and diesel, just to keep the lights on. That means more pollution, higher energy costs and more strain on already stretched budgets,” she said.

Dairo further cautioned against a hasty ban on solar panel imports, likening it to the May 2023 announcement of fuel subsidy removal that led to a surge in petrol prices. She emphasized the need for proper planning and preparedness to ensure a smooth transition to local production.

Samuel Okeriuwa, a renewable energy expert with more than 30 years of experience in solar panel importation at Steady Energy in Lagos, agreed the proposed solar panel import ban could lead to a price increase, resulting in people reverting “to fuel generators with devastating environmental consequences.”

“The government should call professionals, have a roundtable talk and invest in renewable energy to empower engineers before implementing an importation ban,” he said.

The government is reportedly reviewing the proposal after considerable pushback from various stakeholders, including the NGO Center for Promotion of Private Enterprise.

Banner image: Solar panels being installed on a roof of a house in Lagos, Nigeria. Image by Sunday Alamba/AP Photo.

A new study finds that regional plastic bag bans in the U.S. significantly reduce coastal plastic bag litter compared with areas without such policies.

Single-use plastic bags are one of the most ubiquitous forms of plastic litter. They are rarely recycled and degrade quickly into microplastics that are often ingested by wildlife, leading to injury, stress and death.

To tackle the problem, many municipalities have turned to regulation. As of 2023, roughly one in three U.S. residents lived in an area with some type of plastic bag policy: Ten states  enacted laws to ban plastic bags or charge a fee to discourage their use, another two states enacted such policies in 2024. More than 90% of policies are at the local town level. Meanwhile, more than 100 countries have some type of ban or fee on thin plastic bags.

Despite the widespread adoption of plastic bag policies, there have been limited data on their effectiveness, until now. To fill this gap, study authors Anna Papp, an incoming postdoc at MIT, U.S.,  and Kimberly Oremus, an associate professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Marine Science and Policy, turned to crowd-sourced beach cleanup data collected between 2016 and 2023 by the nonprofit advocacy group Ocean Conservancy. Through its app called Clean Swell, which records trash picked up by volunteers, the NGO has collected long-term, standardized data from more than 226,000 locations globally.

“The volunteers, when they gather their litter, they count and categorize the items and enter that into the app,” Oremus told Mongabay in a video call.

The researchers then cross-referenced that information with municipal-level plastic bag regulations. They compared areas with outright bans on plastic bags versus those with bag fees. They also compared the size of the areas regulated, ranging from whole states to small towns. Areas with no plastic bag legislation served as controls.

The study found that although each area still had an increase in the number of plastic bags collected, areas with plastic bag policies showed a 25-47% decline in plastic bags as a share of total items collected during the study period, relative to those with no bag policies.

“It’s definitely less bad than without the policies,” Papp said.

The researchers found areas with an outright ban on plastic bags or fees for them were more effective than partial bans allowing thicker bags. They also found that large statewide bans were more effective than smaller ones.

Meanwhile, the study didn’t find any effect of the policies on other plastic items like straws and bottles, Oremus said, meaning the decline in plastic bags specifically was likely due to the bag policy and not another factor.

“This study is further proof that single-use plastic bans are effective,” Melissa Valliant, communications director with Beyond Plastics not part of the study, told Mongabay in an email.

Banner image: of a dolphin with a plastic bag by Jedimentat44 via Flickr (CC by 2.0).