Reese Halter

SAN FRANCISCO, 6 February – The mesmerising addiction of staring into screens has “rewired” the brains of young people. And, those screens have stoked a mental health crisis, globally.

Children are less cognitively capable than parents were at their age. Since standardising and measuring cognitive development, which began in the late 1880s, every generation has outperformed their parents.

Higher intelligence, until this present moment, has been attributed to spending more time at school. Learning at school helps develop cognition.

Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform the previous generation, the millennials, on every cognitive measure, from attention to memory, to literacy, to numeracy, to executive functioning, to IQ, even though they spend more time at school than previous generations.

So, what occurred around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development?

SAN FRANCISCO, 18 January – Three in five or, almost 7000 bird species are in steep decline, many from logging native forests. One in eight kinds of birds are facing near-term extinction. Human health, too, is in dire jeopardy. Poisons in freshwater, fossil fuel smog and transnational organised crime are levelling earthly life.

Lest we forget that combusting fossil fuels, wood pellets and palm oil has brought agony and starvation to four million Common Murres, forced Caspian Terns to mate and lay eggs 1700 kilometres farther north than the species has ever been seen before and driven Snowy Owls extinct in Sweden. Elsewhere across the Arctic tundra, this iconic warm-blooded vertebrate is vanishing. It’s simply too hot.

SAN FRANCISCO, 15 December – In spite of a law safeguarding ancient trees, animals and native old-growth within the Salmon Nation Rainforest, the British Columbia Ministry of Forests approved an illegal logging operation that put to death a colossal Yellow Cedar. That Ancient One had an astonishing 8.8-metre (29.9ft) circumference, one of the largest and oldest trees in the province. 

This near 2000-year-old shrine and the surrounding rainforest was home to breeding marbled murrelets, a threatened species. These beautiful seabirds, first cousins of puffins and auklets, nest only in crowns of old-growth within the Salmon Nation Rainforest, laying one egg on a large branch festoon with lichens and mosses.

SAN FRANCISCO, 6 December – Canada is a world leader in destroying its Northern Native Forests, inflicting agony upon the Animal Kingdom and deliberately ruining an indispensable planetary carbon storehouse.

Why were Canadian delegates at the COP30, Brazil, boasting about their climate targets? When in fact, Canada is quickly razing its Native Forests, the best defenders against worsening climate storms.

SAN FRANCISCO, 14 November – Our planetary life support systems are under siege, especially the bees, trees and seas.

Bees are food. Trees are freshwater. Seas are oxygen.

So, why are the bees, trees and seas and everything else within Nature getting destroyed?

The three underlying root causes of our ruinous civilisation: legal, economic and political systems, are all based on the assumption of Man’s supremacy.

The economy is built on human productivity, human inventiveness and plundering Mother Earth’s finite living and non-living jewels. This is why Amazon, Jeff Bezos’s company, is backed by bankers and valued by the economy at >$2tn.

{What’s the difference between a million, billion and trillion in relatable terms? One million seconds is about 12 days. One billion seconds is about 32 years. One trillion seconds is about 32,000 years.}

SAN FRANCISCO, 2 November – For thirty-three years the world’s leaders have postponed action despite incontrovertible scientific evidence and images proving that mankind is rapidly razing and scorching our only home.

The upcoming 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) is a hijacked cash-cow. This year, a four-lane highway has carved up tens of thousands of acres of old-growth Amazon Rainforest, NE Brazil, so that 60,000 foreign participants, including world leaders can grandstand.

SAN FRANCISCO, October 8 – Animals are the heartbeat of this meaningful planet. Certain animals, like Northeast Pacific Herring, are Mother Earth’s engineers. That is, they are the hub that sustains their community.

From British Columbia’s fjord-rich Inside Passage to Alaska’s famed Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, heralded Herring and their proteinaceous eggs (roes) feed an impressive array of predators, including hundreds of marine and terrestrial species. Fascinatingly, their carcasses provide the coastal Salmon Nation Rainforests with nitrogen, a crucial marine-derived nutrient for colossal castles, the trees. (Incidentally, Herring also feed flies that power millions of migrating songbirds).  

Herring can live for 20 years and spawn up to nine times. Herring support Humpback and Gray Whales, Orcas, Sharks, Chinook Salmon, Porpoises, Dolphins, Seals, Sealions, Sea Otters, Halibut, Rockfish, Cod, Hake, Lingcod, Dogfish, Steelhead Trout, Surf Scoters, Bald Eagles, Common Murres (80 per cent of their diet during breeding season), Sea Wolves, Spirit and Black Bears and others.

Welcome to Mother’s intertwined time-tested heaven on Earth.

SAN FRANCISCO, October 11 — The health and wellbeing of the oceans are the mainstay of earthly life. The world’s leaders are hell-bent to annihilate the oceans for the almighty dollar.

Ocean mining is the finishing blow. It will bankrupt irreplaceable biodiverse oases along seamounts, deep ocean floors and vents, and the abyssal plain.

There are trillions of deep ocean polymetallic nodules containing cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese (and other rare earths) used in the batteries of electric cars and other machines as we transition to renewable energies.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 18 – Since 2019, the Eastern Pacific Gray Whale population along the west coast of North America has plummeted. At least 6260 emaciated masterpieces, or almost one-third of the Grays, have washed ashore or sunk into Davey Jones’s locker.

Allow me to remind you that these 40-ton Majesties travel between their icy summer Arctic feeding grounds and warmer salty breeding lagoons in Baja California, Mexico, 12,000mi (~19,300km) roundtrip.

“It’s all gone.
Home equity, gone.
Family money, gone.
Empty shush’d up boxes.
Missing dead bees
Gone, too.”
Bemoan’d beekeeper.

SAN FRANCISCO, February 7 – Just before Christmas Eve, Tahlequah (J35), a majestic Salish Sea Orca that grieved in 2018 for 17 days whilst carrying her calf in her mouth for 1000 miles (1600km), gave birth to a female, J61.

One-week later J61 died. Over again, Tahlequah began grieving. This time she clutched her daughter for 11 days and swam 650 miles (1046km) before mother and corpse disappeared on 11 January 2025.

The Salish Sea is nestled between British Columbia, Canada, and Washington, United States. There are about seven million people in near proximity to this sea.

SAN FRANCISCO, 26 January – Almost 114 million Americans suffer from loneliness. Yet, there’s a free cure awaiting them outside their front doors.

Spending 20 minutes each day in nature i.e., your yard, local greenspace, community forest, river walkway, beach shoreline, desertscape or anywhere in the wild erases that feeling of emptiness or neglectfulness, whilst boosting your mental health, cognitive function and lowering stress.

The sounds of water running, waves lapping, wind rustling, birds singing, frogs chorusing and bees buzzing are a salubrious tonic.

Shut your personal device down. Revel in silence. Take a walk. Clear your mind. Look around at the little things that run the natural world. Listen. Smell. Touch. Breathe to the bottom of your lungs. Stay in one spot for several moments. Smile. Rejuvenate.

SAN FRANCISCO, January 18 – Big banks have spent $213bn on constructing new intake/outtake liquefied natural gas (LNG) ports, planet-decimating ‘climate bombs’.

Since 2023, 108 new terminals (8 export, 99 import) have increased the world’s export capacity by 7 per cent, and the global import capacity by 19 per cent.

Big banks have committed funding for completion of another 156 LNG terminal projects (63 export, 93 import) by 2030.

These monstrosities will bleed the equivalent methane of the current annual emissions of all coal-fired facilities combined, 10 billion tons of HEAT during the next five years.

LNG is a dirty fossil fuel. It’s at least 24 per cent worse for the climate than coal.

SAN FRANCISCO, December 20 – From 2014 to 2016 an unrelenting marine heatwave, ‘The Blob’, stoked by fossil fuel, wood pellet and palm oil combustion heat lambasted marine life along the west coast of North America.

That ocean heat, as much as 5.5C (10F) above normal, decimated Alaska’s Common Murre population. An estimated 4,000,000 seabirds starved to death. Alaska’s most prominent seabirds are in a deadly tailspin – half the population is gone and showing no signs of recovery, a decade later.

Murres are carnivorous, depending mostly on fish. They forage alone or in flocks, often with other seabirds. These Majesties ‘fly’ underwater using their wings for propulsion. They can dive as deep as 180m (591ft), usually they hunt between 20-50m (66-164ft) below the surface. Murres consume prey underwater, except when bringing fish to feed young.

Nineteen Seventy-Six,
Enter Dr Bob Brown,
Franklin River dam preventer,
Conscientious objector:
Nuclear arms hunger striker,
Afghanistan protestor,
President GW Bush snubber,
Tibetan human rights championer,
Take that China!

Record-breaking climate firestorms are raging across the Amazon Rainforest. A stubborn South American drought and extreme temperatures are stoking climate fires in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and Paraguay.

Global heating has scorched millions of hectares in the Amazon Basin this year. It’s so horrible that black rain with soot from these monster fires has poisoned Brazilian cities. That toxic smoke (50X above the World Health Organisation’s safe level) has choked 10.3 million km²(4 million mi²), an area larger than the United States.

Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Forestry, Big Animal Agri and Big Fisheries have unleashed hell on earthly life and governments are paying them to do so.

Fossil-fuelled ocean heat has lambasted coral reefs, home to 25% of marine life. This manmade heat is simply too much for sharks, so they are leaving reefs.

Cold-blooded grey reef sharks are moving offshore into deeper cooler waters and this spells disaster for coral life systems attempting to hang-on.

Sharks keep coral reefs in balance. They eat both herbivores and smaller predatory fish, and prevent reefs from being overgrazed or overgrown by algae.