Susquehanna Group of the Sierra Club

11/09/2026

The northern giant hornet, widely nicknamed the "murder hornet," is the world’s largest hornet, measuring up to two inches long. Native to parts of Asia, a small hunting party of these insects can enter a coordinated "slaughter phase" and wipe out an entire European honeybee hive of 30,000 bees in as little as 90 minutes, systematically decapitating the adult defenders with heavy mandibles before harvesting the honeybee brood to feed their own young.

First confirmed in Washington state near the Canadian border in December 2019, the species gave the Washington State Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture a narrow window to prevent a permanent North American invasion. The entire eradication campaign came down to beating the autumn calendar. Throughout the summer, a giant hornet colony produces only sterile workers. Every fall, however, the nest shifts gears and rears hundreds of new queens and males. Once those young queens leave the home tree, mate, and burrow into the soil to overwinter, a single hidden nest can multiply into dozens of new colonies the following spring.

Finding a concealed cavity inside thousands of acres of dense Washington timber and suburban woodlots required tracking live hornets back to their front door. On October 7, 2020, state entomologists captured a live worker and used dental floss to tie a miniature radio transmitter around its waist. Because the tiny battery lasted only about 12 hours and the thick forest canopy cut the radio signal down to just 20 or 30 feet, the field crew lost the hornet inside a tangled blackberry thicket after about 10 minutes.

Refusing to let the autumn window close, the team trapped and tagged three more hornets two weeks later on October 21. This time, one of the radio-tagged workers flew straight back to a narrow crevice high inside the trunk of a hollow red alder tree on private property in Blaine, where researchers watched dozens of hornets flying in and out.

Before dawn on October 24, 2020, crews in thick white protective suits wrapped the trunk in foam and plastic wrap, vacuumed between 85 and nearly 100 live hornets straight out of the cavity into clear collection canisters, and pumped carbon dioxide gas into the tree to suffocate any survivors before sawing out the section holding the nest.

Two days later, when biologists split the cut log open in the laboratory, they discovered they had arrived with just days to spare. Inside sat 76 live queens and 108 sealed cells containing pupae that biologists believed were almost all developing virgin queens ready to emerge and scatter across the Pacific Northwest. Lead state entomologist Sven Spichiger noted that the team had arrived "just in time," as several of the new queens had probably already begun slipping out of the tree.

Using the same radio-tracking playbook, crews tracked down and destroyed three more northern giant hornet nests hidden inside tree hollows around Whatcom County across the remainder of 2020 and the summer of 2021.

After the fourth nest was vacuumed out and destroyed in late 2021, thousands of citizen-science bottle traps and state lures set across the border region turned up zero confirmed hornets in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Although a suspicious photograph taken on a hummingbird feeder in Kitsap County in October 2024 briefly put trappers on alert, follow-up searches found no evidence of the insect. In December 2024, after passing the international benchmark of three consecutive years without a confirmed detection, state and federal officials officially declared the northern giant hornet eradicated from the United States. As Spichiger put it at the close of the five-year campaign, "It is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects."

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Washington State Department of Agriculture (2020; 2024) / U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service / Spichiger et al., WSDA Pest Program Reports.

10/21/2026

By Simon Jessop LONDON, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions is accelerating, pushing many of the Earth's most important ecosystems close to their tipping points, said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Speaking at the Reuter...

10/20/2026

10/20/2026

Over the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of posts about John Rich coming to Upstate New York to help protect and defend “our farmland” from solar development.

And I think that’s wonderful news.

Because, surely, that means we’ve collectively decided to start helping farmers pay their property taxes, mortgages, equipment loans, insurance premiums, and all the other expenses required to keep “our farmland” in production.

Right?

There’s so much irony in this “movement.” There’s the irony that those rallying about the “environmental degradation” wrought by solar have absolutely nothing to say about the proven damages of continued fossil fuel use. Or those who complain about the aesthetics are quite mum about the appearance of a nuclear plant, coal mine, or natural gas refinery.

Or, perhaps one of the more entertaining, watching people who warn ominously of a looming “socialist takeover” of agriculture while simultaneously referring to privately owned farmland as though it belongs to the general public. Have we forgotten what socialism truly is?

In New York State, and elsewhere (the exception being solar development on public lands, which does not occur here and largely exists in the West, and is something I've already voiced my opposition to), solar developers can’t just show up, declare eminent domain, and start planting solar panels in someone’s hayfield. Even large-scale solar projects that go before the Office of Renewable Energy Siting must start with agreements from willing landowners.

In New York, no farmland is put into solar without the farmer’s sign-off. There is no exception to that rule. Not a single one.

So…are we suggesting that farmers are incapable of making informed decisions about their own property? That we’re a bunch of gullible country bumpkins who can’t read our own contracts? That we aren’t capable of consulting our own legal counsel with questions, of understanding the financial implications of a solar lease, or figuring out what’s the best choice for our land and families?

Are we planning to pass the hat around to pay for attorneys who can help farmers review those contracts? Because if you’re really, truly worried that we’re too dumb to make these decisions, by all means: I think a dedicated fund for legal counsel would be an excellent use of everyone’s time, money, and energy.

Truly, I’m glad that we all have this sudden, passionate interest in protecting farmers’ financial interests. I just wish that enthusiasm extended beyond TikTok and into real life.

I’m tired. I’m tired of listening to people rant and rave, people who have never had to sweat out the terms of an operating loan, or subsist on just four hours of sleep a night for months during lambing or calving or sugaring, or worry about how they’ll make the mortgage payment when milk prices continue to tank.

I’m tired of being called “a sellout” by people who have made themselves guardians of somebody else’s acreage while continuing to get their food not from farm stands and CSAs but from Walmart and DoorDash. I am tired of the complete and utter cognitive dissonance.

Look. If we want to advocate for farmers, or even for farmland, that’s great. But we sure as hell aren’t going about it the right way. The way to do it is not by saying, “Hey, have you considered making less money so I don’t have to look at solar panels?”

You want to support a farmer? Be willing to pay what food actually costs, not what the government says it costs. Be willing to trust farmers when they say they know what’s best for their land. Stop treating us like unpaid caretakers of the rural scenery you enjoy driving past.

And spare me the lectures about solar subsidies. Especially when those lectures come from content creators who are perfectly comfortable using taxpayer-funded agricultural grants to finance their “self-sufficient” barns with in-floor heating that they did not build themselves and have never been used to grow a single ounce of food to be sold to the public.

I’m all for protecting farmland. But I care a hell of a lot more about the farmers who own it.

Not every square inch of farmland needs to be put into solar. I’ve never argued that it should. I HAVE argued that these decisions need to be made by actual working farmers, not neighbors, not politicians, and certainly not social media influencers playacting as changemakers.

Farmland doesn’t remain in production through manufactured Facebook outrage, celebrity appearances, or inspirational speeches about how valuable American farmland is.

It stays in agriculture when somebody can afford to continue farming it.

10/20/2026

10/20/2026

This proposed federal permitting bill could help some things we want but it could also make some important things worse.

10/20/2026

🎃Pumpkin Smash!

📍Saturday, November 7th
9AM-1PM
Broome County Regional Farmers Market (840 Upper Front St. Binghamton)

Bring your Halloween pumpkins (or leaves!) the day of the event or between 11/1-11/6 to CCE Broome County or the VINES office! This event will turn your pumpkins into compost for both the VINES and Cornell Cooperative Extension-Broome County compost sites.

Other event activities will include the community naming of VINES' new compost tumblers and a pie raffle!

10/20/2026

Every three or four years, the Arctic loses its lemmings. Every time it does, the consequences reach as far as West Africa, South America, and various parts of the United States.

Unlike most northern mammals, lemmings breed all winter long under the snow. Working in the insulated air gap between the frozen soil and the bottom of the snowpack, a single female can have four or five litters over a nine-month winter, with up to seven pups at a time. In just two to three years, a local population can multiply a hundred to a thousand times over. Then, often within a single season, it collapses to almost zero.

In 2003, a 15-year field study in northeastern Greenland published in the journal *Science* showed what drives that clock. Researchers tracked the lemming alongside its four main predators: the arctic fox, the snowy owl, the long-tailed skua, and the stoat.

When lemming numbers start climbing, foxes, owls, and skuas react right away. They eat more, lay bigger clutches, and raise larger litters. Still, they cannot eat fast enough to stop a rodent that multiplies a thousandfold in three years.

The predator that breaks the boom is the stoat. Because of a one-year reproductive delay, the stoat population does not peak until a full year after the rodent boom is already underway. While foxes and owls have to hunt from above the snow, a stoat is thin enough to slip straight down into the winter tunnels where lemmings sleep and breed. Canadian researcher Dominique Fauteux once checked his wooden lemming traps in the field and found that stoats had moved inside and turned the boxes into winter pantries stuffed with dead lemmings.

Once the delayed wave of stoats catches up, the combined hunting pressure from all four predators finally overtakes the lemmings' birth rate. The rodent population crashes, the predators starve, and the survivors start rebuilding from scratch.

During a peak lemming year, everything on the tundra catches a break. Arctic foxes gorge on rodents and ignore almost everything else. Snowy owls raise huge broods on open hummocks. Ground-nesting shorebirds hatch their clutches at high rates because no predator bothers hunting for camouflaged eggs when fat rodents are running underneath every bush.

When the lemmings vanish, the northern food web turns on itself. Stoat populations starve in place. Snowy owls skip breeding altogether and fly south into the northern United States, perching on fence posts and hunting meadow voles across frozen farm fields until the tundra recovers. Arctic foxes leave the barrens and walk south into the timber; in the winter of 1974, one walked more than 500 miles from Hudson Bay to an oak forest near Winnipeg. Most never make it back.

The longest reach of a lemming crash, though, does not travel through owls or foxes. It travels through bird eggs.

With no rodents left to catch, starving arctic foxes comb the tundra for anything holding calories. They wipe out goose clutches, ptarmigan nests, and the ground nests of migratory shorebirds. Across the Arctic, nesting success for wading birds drops sharply the exact same summer the lemmings disappear, a pattern biologists have tracked for decades as the alternative prey hypothesis.

Because those Arctic shorebirds migrate, they carry that crash across the globe. Every autumn, the sandpipers, plovers, and knots that nest on the tundra fly south to wintering grounds in Europe, West Africa, South America, and Australia. After a big lemming year, thousands of young birds survive the summer and show up on southern coastlines. After a lemming crash, the foxes eat the eggs, and the winter flocks shrink. Biologists counting shorebirds on the mudflats of the Wadden Sea or the coast of Mauritania in January are recording the aftermath of a rodent collapse that happened under the snow 4,000 miles north the previous spring.

Around the year 2000, the cycle in northeastern Greenland broke down. Warmer winter weather changed the bottom layer of the snowpack that lemmings need to keep their tunnels insulated, and winter breeding failed. Without the regular rodent peaks, the predators that rely on them began disappearing from the study areas. Snowy owls largely stopped nesting on Greenland's Traill Island, and local stoat numbers dropped to nearly zero, leaving only the scavenging arctic fox behind.

When the lemming cycle stalls out, the tundra never gets its relief years. The foxes stay hungry, the owls leave, and the shorebird nests get raided every single summer instead of once every four years, sending the ripple all the way from an Arctic snowdrift to a mudflat on the other side of the world.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Gilg, Hanski & Sittler (2003), Science / Fauteux et al., Canadian Museum of Nature / Maclean’s (2022) / Science (2014) / WWF Arctic / Wrigley & Hatch (1976), Arctic