Shifting Sands

Sand looks solid until you build on it. Climate denial works the same way: a cherry-picked chart, a polar bear count stripped of context, a study that supposedly doesn’t exist. From a distance, it holds. Put weight on it and it shifts.

This section puts weight on it. Each piece takes a specific claim by a specific author, whether a think-tank writer, a coal lobbyist or a self-styled environmentalist, and checks it against the science, often with help from the researchers who did the work. I’ve spent decades in the places these arguments are about, on reefs, in deserts and in forests, and the evidence on the ground is not ambiguous.

Alongside them are older fights for wild animals and wild places: a hellbender handled for the camera, the trade in elephant ivory, and a glass stadium built on a migratory flyway.