The 2 Windows Project

05/13/2026

Neither the science nor the math add up.

05/11/2026

The U.S. Forest Service isn’t managing forests anymore. It’s running a timber operation and poisoning everything else to do it.

A yearlong investigation by Mother Jones found that the Forest Service and private logging companies are systematically spraying thousands of acres of national forest with glyphosate (Roundup) to kill off native shrubs and wildflowers that compete with commercially valuable trees like Douglas firs and sugar pines.

After wildfires, forests naturally rebound with diverse vegetation and wildlife. What’s replacing that recovery is rows of industrial saplings surrounded by silence. No insects, birds, or flowers. It’s just dead zones.

Glyphosate application in California’s forests has quintupled over the last two decades in one year 266,000 pounds were sprayed a record. The World Health Organization classifies glyphosate as a carcinogen. The Forest Service is using it at industrial scale, on public land, to benefit private timber interests.

This is what “multiple use management” looks like when timber wins every time. Ecological health, wildlife habitat, native plant communities all of it gets written off as competition.

05/04/2026

God’s actual creation > capitalist AI dystopia

05/04/2026

04/30/2026

Shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) is what happens when we forget how vibrant the natural world used to be. Each generation grows up with a more depleted environment and calls it “normal,” simply because it’s all they’ve ever known.

Think about walking through a park and thinking, “This seems healthy.” But maybe 30 years ago that same park had twice as many birds, wildflowers, or insects. If you never saw that version, you don’t feel the loss — and that quiet forgetting becomes the new baseline. Over time, we start accepting degraded ecosystems as normal.

Researchers warn that this shift lowers our expectations, increases our tolerance for decline, and reduces our urgency to protect what’s left.

What helps:

Intergenerational conversations that reconnect us with what nature used to be.

Direct experiences with nature that sharpen our awareness of change.

Remembering (knowing) the past is the first step to restoring the future.

04/30/2026

04/29/2026

In a little more than a year, Lee Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the E.P.A.’s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to, including regulations aimed at cutting Americans’ exposure to arsenic, a known carcinogen; mercury, a potent neurotoxin; and PM2.5, a form of very fine soot that has been shown to cause asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.

Much of the damage that Zeldin has done is, as one former E.P.A. official told Elizabeth Kolbert, “generational.” Since Zeldin took over, the agency’s staff has been cut by 25 per cent; 700 of the people who left held doctoral degrees. The institutional knowledge that these experts took with them isn’t coming back. And the additional pollutants that get spewed into the air and water aren’t going away. According to one report, the E.P.A.’s recent policy changes will send some 1.5 billion extra tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2030 and some 12 billion extra tons by 2040.

This extra carbon dioxide will still be contributing to hotter temperatures and higher sea levels centuries from now. Forever chemicals will last, if not actually forever, certainly for the foreseeable future. “It is impossible at this point to say how many premature deaths Zeldin’s deregulatory campaign will lead to, but the numbers could easily run to the tens of thousands,” Kolbert writes. Read her report on what Zeldin has done to the E.P.A.—and what it could do to our planet: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/nJZoHP