"Can cities continue to grow without destroying Earth? A new paper from ICTA-UAB, Spain, offers insight into this complex issue." "Although cities are key players in the fight against climate change, their economic, demographic, and spatial growth continues to generate severe environmental impacts that are difficult to control." https://phys.org/news/2025-07-cities-climate-crossroads-growth-degrowth.html
Brazil’s most revered Indigenous leader, Raoni Metuktire, has said he believes that one of the former president Jair Bolsonaro’s goals while in office was to “exterminate” the country’s Indigenous peoples. “He really wanted to exterminate us. But Indigenous peoples across Brazil united to resist his government,” he says, adding that “from now on, every president elected in Brazil must respect Indigenous peoples”
the Guardian
Bolsonaro wanted to exterminate us, claims Indigenous leader Raoni Metuktire
KayapĂł chief tells in memoir of seeing former president in his dreams and of warning Lula not to repeat past mistakes
Big Tech are suing government who try and properly tackle e-waste. "The Indian unit of U.S. air conditioning giant Carrier (CARR.N), opens new tab has become the latest major firm to sue Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government over electronic waste rules that have hiked the fees manufacturers must pay to recyclers." https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/carrier-becomes-latest-global-firm-sue-india-over-electronic-waste-rules-2025-07-07/
"When AI data centers come to town, companies promise jobs and opportunities. In one drought-stricken community in Brazil, residents are weighing the choices. How do communities balance the economic boost and environmental cost of hosting water-reliant data centers?"
Al Jazeera
The Take: Why is drought-hit Brazil saying yes to AI data centers?
Brazil is turning to AI data centers to boost its economy, but critics say they put our ecological future at risk.
 During a global water crisis, along comes a water guzzler. Don't worry, we're going to use all the data in the data centers to solve the global water crisis.
Why do so many still promote AI when they know how much damage it's doing? Is it greed? Ambition? At a moment when we need to stand up for something, so few of us do. "Writing represents a unique opportunity to exercise abstract thinking. If AI is corrupting students’ ability to write (and to read, since they can now ask AI to summarize their readings), I’m concerned that it is also undermining their ability to generate ideas by thinking theoretically and conceptually."
Future U
COMMENTARY by Ulises A. Mejias: The Core of Gen-AI is Incompatible with Academic Integrity - Future U
By encouraging GenAI, we are directly undermining the principles we have been trying to instill in our students. Many years ago, I had a student wh...
"My main concern is that, by encouraging the adoption of GenAI, we in the educational field are directly undermining the principles we have been trying to instill in our students. On the one hand, we tell them that plagiarism is bad. On the other hand, we give them a plagiarism machine, which, as an aside, may reduce their chances of getting a job, damage the environment, and widen inequality gaps in the process." Ulises A. Mejias
Future U
COMMENTARY by Ulises A. Mejias: The Core of Gen-AI is Incompatible with Academic Integrity - Future U
By encouraging GenAI, we are directly undermining the principles we have been trying to instill in our students. Many years ago, I had a student wh...
"We found man-made lakes full of radioactive sludge and heard claims of polluted water and contaminated soil, which, in the past, have been linked to clusters of cancer and birth defects." "Machines are constantly on the hunt for rare earths called neodymium and dysprosium that go into making powerful magnets for a variety of modern technology, from electric vehicles to computer hard drives."
News
China rare earths: The BBC visits the world's mining capital for the metals - BBC News
The price of the rare earth metals the world buys from China
It’s not an energy production problem we have. It’s an energy consumption problem. We consume too much. We need to let Nature go dark, let Nature recover. Instead, we’re being sold more tech scams. All over the world, solar panels have somehow become the best friend of biodiversity, according to countless breathless reports. The solution to biodiversity collapse is to cover the earth with solar panels? Is that it?
Gerry McGovern
You can’t get to clean energy through dirty mining.