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2026-03-16 01:09:24

Amid surging oil prices and an unpopular war of choice in Iran, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is threatening not to renew the licenses of broadcasters for “running hoaxes and news distortions.” The Saturday post from Carr on X is not subtle: It explicitly warns broadcasters that they “have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.” 

Carr’s missive came in response to a Truth Social post on Saturday from President Donald Trump, which the FCC chair included in full as a screenshot. The post from Trump focused on coverage of the war in Iran by outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, along with “other Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media.” (Unlike networks such as ABC and NBC, which broadcast over public airwaves, newspapers do not have licenses that the FCC can go after.)

The broader context is clear: Trump and senior administration figures are trying to coerce independent news outlets into parroting the government line. The effort comes as poll numbers show most Americans do not approve of the war in Iran and oil prices top $100 per barrel. 

Trump’s Truth Social post fixated on a short update from the Wall Street Journal reporting that five refueling planes had been damaged in recent days during an Iranian strike against an air base in Saudi Arabia. The more fundamental issue is that Trump seems to recognize that he is now stuck in a poorly planned and unnecessary war of his own choosing that has upended the global economy. Rather than admit that, Trump administration officials—in a classic authoritarian move—are trying to use state power to get news outlets to obscure their incompetence. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not been subtle about that. During a Friday news conference focused on the war in Iran, Hegseth said that he was looking forward to CNN being taken over by David Ellison, the son of the Trump-supporting Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is worth roughly $200 billion.

One day later, Carr tried to subvert the editorial independence of broadcasters. Nor is it the first time Carr has tried to do so. Last year, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was “indefinitely” pulled off the air after the FCC chair threatened to target ABC. Kimmel only returned to the air following a massive backlash.

With the likely takeover of CNN by Ellison, who installed Bari Weiss at the top of CBS News after purchasing the network last year, the administration is pursuing what may prove to be a more effective track. Instead of trying to coerce outlets, it is working to put friendly billionaires in charge. From there, the oligarchs can do the administration’s bidding without even being told.

2026-03-15 20:00:00

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nature is slowing down, and its ability to regenerate is failing in the face of climate change, according to the authors of a new analysis of the speed of species turnover in ecosystems across the world. 

The finding comes as a big surprise to many ecologists. They have long predicted that nature will respond to climate change and humanity’s other assaults by ramping up the rate of turnover, with existing species moving out and new ones moving in. Some studies have appeared to confirm this is happening.

But the latest and largest analysis, published last month by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, has found the opposite. And the slowdown is big. Measured as comings and goings over a time frame of up to five years, species turnover is down by a third since the mid-1970s, when the current trend of rapidly rising global temperatures began.  

This is bad news, says the lead author Emmanuel Nwankwo. “Nature functions like a self-repairing engine, constantly swapping out old parts for new ones. But we found this engine is now grinding to a halt.” 

Nwankwo and his Queen Mary University colleague Axel Rossberg analyzed research assembled in BioTIME, a unique global database of hundreds of separate studies of the composition of ecosystems. Encompassing everything from North American birds to terrestrial plants, freshwater ecosystems, and fish on the seabed, it contains records from more than half a million locations, gathered over the past 150 years.

“We were very surprised at the discovery,” says Rossberg. “We did not expect at all to see the slowdown.” Such findings are “the opposite of existing expectations,” agrees ecologist Christopher Terry of the University of Oxford, who in a separate study with Rossberg found short-term turnover decline in the data on North American birds in habitats modified by humans. 

Most ecologists contacted by Yale Environment 360 endorsed the new findings. “The results look quite convincing to me,” says Ryan Chisholm, a theoretical ecologist at the National University of Singapore. 

These scientists suggested that, by concentrating on changes on a short timescale of five years rather than the longer periods of other research, the new study had identified an important phenomenon of slowdown in natural “intrinsic” species turnover that could influence how ecosystems are able to respond to external forces such as climate change. 

Yet the head of BioTIME’s leadership council, biologist Maria Dornelas, says her analysis of data from two large, long-term studies in her database—the North Sea International Bottom Trawl Survey and the 60-year old North American Breeding Bird Survey run by the US Geological Survey with Canadian and Mexican counterparts—found an increase in species turnover in recent decades. Comparing her work with that of Nwankwo, she says: “I am finding it difficult to reconcile the two findings.”

Other researchers attributed any discrepancies in estimates of the rate of species turnover to the time frames of the different studies.

“You might get pushback from people who have observed a net increase in turnover rates using a long time window,” says Jacob O’Sullivan, an ecology modeler at Forest Research, an agency of the British government. “But slowdown does appear to be the correct interpretation [of] their results.”

The new research findings have rekindled a long-running argument among ecologists about how communities of species in natural environments function. At root is the question of whether changes in the composition of natural ecosystems are prevalent, and whether they should be seen as good or bad for the ecosystem.

Most ecologists once believed that healthy ecosystems are naturally stable, with a low turnover of species. Left to themselves, they reach a perfected equilibrium that the influential 19th-century American botanist Frederic Clements termed a “climax ecosystem.”  After any disruption, they return to this stable state, a process called succession.

This stability was seen as vital, because the functioning of the ecosystem—whether tropical rainforests, temperate grasslands, or polar tundra—depended on tight living relationships between species that had evolved together and were mutually dependent. Predators and prey, and plants and the insects that fed on them and pollinated them, were inseparable. Species turnover disrupted those associations and could lead to ecological breakdown. 

Echoing this idea, many ecologists still quote the “rivet-popper hypothesis,” first articulated in the 1980s by biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. He likened an ecosystem to an aircraft, in which each part, down to the smallest rivet, is vital for the plane to fly safely. Removing a single apparently insignificant species from an ecosystem might be like popping a rivet in the aircraft. It could cause the aircraft to crash—or the ecosystem to collapse. In this framing, species turnover looks like a bad thing.

But detailed long-running studies of unperturbed ecosystems have shown that even the most pristine ecosystems are not so unchanging. In a famous long-term tracking of nature on an island in Lake Superior, Daniel Botkin at the University of California, Santa Barbara, documented ecosystems constantly changing their composition. “Species in ecosystems are not fixed entities, even without human-induced change,” says Anne Magurran of St Andrews University, the founder of BioTIME. “All ecosystems experience natural turnover.”

Ecologists call this natural churn within unstressed ecosystems “intrinsic turnover.” And most now agree that this turnover is a sign not of fragility and imminent breakdown, but, as Terry puts it, “the ongoing back-and-forth of a healthy ecosystem.” It can be driven by internal dynamics such as natural fire regimes that periodically wipe out forests, cycles in predator-prey relationships, or periodic outbreaks of disease. Or it can be essentially random.

Many species, from lemmings to jellyfish, have boom-and-bust cycles with no obvious external cause. Whole ecosystems can also be made up of mosaics of habitat patches that spontaneously shift, such as the regular switches between woodland and grassland seen in some savannah regions of Africa. 

Rossberg likens these internal dynamics to a giant, unending game of rock paper scissors. And far from being a sideshow, he says, they appear to be the dominant cause of short-term species turnover. Moreover, in a world of growing external pressures such as a changing climate, increased turnover may indicate that the ecosystem is responding and adapting, with some species going locally extinct or migrating out, while other colonizers move in. Which makes it a positively good thing. 

If those who adhere to the rivet-popper hypothesis are right, then the new evidence of slowdown might be good news. For it would suggest that most ecosystems are growing more stable, and remain largely uninfluenced by human activities, including climate change. But if, on the other hand, significant species turnover is the healthy norm for ecosystems, a sign of resilience rather than fragility, then any decline in turnover is bad news, especially when turnover is increasingly needed as a survival strategy in a world of widespread human interference in nature.

So, what is causing this unexpected slowdown? Terry says it likely shows that “humans are disrupting the background [intrinsic] turnover of these systems.” Rossberg says the central problem is probably that natural landscapes are increasingly fragmented. So, as some species disappear, there are fewer opportunities for replacement colonists to migrate from nearby. This “slows the pace at which species replace one another,” he says, reducing the ability of the isolated ecosystems to conduct running repairs and threatening their long-term survival. 

O’Sullivan agrees. His own research has found that species turnover “increases with both the size of the regional species pool and the connectivity of the landscape. The new study makes the case that a regional decline in [species] richness may explain the local decline in turnover.”

In a sporting analogy popular with some ecologists, there are fewer players “on the bench” to make tactical substitutions if things are not going well on the field. A less fragmented landscape will have a larger species pool “on the bench,” ready to replace those disappearing, and allowing increased species turnover if the situation demands.

Something like this is suggested by a major study published in January on tree-species diversity in the Amazon and Andes. Covering more than 400 forest plots surveyed over four decades, the study found that plots in areas with less fragmented forest had faster turnover rates, as lost species were replaced by new colonists. Their biodiversity held up. But more fragmented forests lost biodiversity, because they were less able to recoup losses with new arrivals from surrounding forests.

The bottom line, most ecologists contacted for this article agree, is that ecosystems in the 21st century need to change faster, with more turnover of species, in order to cope with human impacts, whether local land degradation or global climate change. Staying the same is no longer an option. But if the new study is right that turnover is declining sharply in most places, then they are in even more trouble that we thought.

So, what does this mean for conservation? One implication is conceptual. The prevailing assumption among conservationists today remains that, as Jacob O’Sullivan of Forest Research puts it, ecological communities “turn over predominantly in response [to] environmental change and direct anthropogenic pressures.”  That assumption makes ecosystem change synonymous with ecosystem degradation and suggests that halting species turnover—keeping the ecological rivets in place—should be conservationists’ primary task.  

But if, as the new ecology appears to demonstrate, species churn is a routine and necessary feature of healthy ecosystems, then protecting the rivets makes much less sense. “Once we accept natural turnover as a force, we must accept change as natural and not to be fought against, despite our intuition to the contrary,” says James Rosindell at Imperial College London.

Allowing rare and endangered species in some cases to disappear from ecosystems in the expectation that other perhaps more common and adaptable species will take their place, may be a stretch for most conservationists. But Rosindell and other ecologists say we should be more relaxed about the possible local disappearance of species. 

“Trying to freeze communities in stasis may well be pushing against the tide,” says Terry. It may simply be putting another wrench in the “engine” of species turnover, blocking the processes of adaptation that ecosystems require in order to survive. It may end up trying to save ecosystems from themselves.

2026-03-14 23:56:54

When Charles Thomson and William Barton designed the Great Seal of the United States more than 200 years ago, they were unambiguous about its meaning. A bald eagle would clutch arrows in one set of talons, symbolizing war, and an olive branch in the other, symbolizing peace. In 1945, President Harry Truman officially declared that the bird’s head should always face toward the olive branch—denoting America’s preference for peace.

Now, the administration of the self-proclaimed “president of peace”—who claims to have ended eight wars, even as he starts new ones—will mint dimes without the olive branch at all. It’s part of the US Mint’s semiquincentennial line, a one-year-only redesign of US coinage commemorating America’s 250th birthday.

The new designs were unveiled in December, but the absence of the olive branch on the back of the dime came under renewed scrutiny this past week after it was highlighted by Fortune. News editor Catherina Gioino wrote that the “omission is hard to read as accidental,” calling it a “cultural signal” of our war-torn times.

The medallic artist behind the dime, Eric David Custer, told Spotlight PA in February that the lack of the olive branch is a reference to the American Revolution, when colonists were striving for peace but hadn’t yet achieved it. But Frank L. Holt, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Houston, said in an interview with the Washington Post that the controversy over the dropped olive branch “condemns the whole design.”

“Money talks, but it should speak plainly and with clear purpose,” Holt said. 

Indeed, it’s difficult not to see the new dime within the context of other coinage decisions at the US Mint. All of the semiquincentennial designs had to receive final approval from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who axed several recommendations developed under President Joe Biden’s administration by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. The rejected designs included coins that featured renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass and ones commemorating women’s suffrage and school desegregation. In December, US Treasurer Brandon Beach decried those designs as part of Biden’s “DEI and Critical Race Theory policies.”

“The new Semiquincentennial Quarter designs will celebrate American history and the founding of our great nation,” Beach told Fox News. “The Trump administration is dedicated to fostering prosperity and patriotism.”

The commemorative coin line is just one of many ways that the Trump administration has used America’s 250th anniversary as an opportunity to crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion and rewrite America’s history in President Donald Trump’s image. Scowling next to portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Trump’s face has graced National Park Service passes and massive banners draped from federal buildings.

And, naturally, Trump’s face was one of the designs proposed by the US Mint for a semiquincentennial $1 coin.

In December, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced a bill, titled the “Change Corruption Act,” to block any living president from appearing on US currency.

“While monarchs put their faces on coins,” Cortez Masto said in a press release, “America has never had and never will have a king.”

2026-03-14 22:26:57

The yearslong battle over TikTok’s ownership has concluded in a $10 billion windfall for the Trump administration. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors in the recently completed deal to create a US-controlled TikTok will pay the government the exorbitant sum for its role in helping broker the transaction. The fee is about 70 percent of the new US TikTok’s $14 billion valuation.

Finalized in January, the TikTok deal concludes a saga that began in 2019, when US politicians began raising alarms about the Chinese-owned app’s potential threat to national security. In 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban.

But Trump—despite being the first president to attempt such a ban—made “saving TikTok” one of his focal points in his second term, recognizing the app’s appeal with young voters. Trump’s solution? Transfer ownership of TikTok’s US operations to an American investor group led by one of his billionaire allies, Larry Ellison.

Ellison is the chairman and co-founder of the software giant Oracle, which now holds an ownership stake and board seat in US TikTok. Private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati artificial intelligence investment company MGX are also lead investors, while ByteDance retains a 19.9 percent stake, the most permitted by law.

Critics have raised concerns that the Trump-brokered TikTok sale would enrich the president’s allies. Ellison—one of the richest men in the world—hosted a $100,000-per-person fundraising dinner for Trump in 2020. His son, David, has used his recent acquisition of Paramount Skydance as an opportunity to push CBS News to the right. (The Ellison family might soon add CNN to its media empire, a prospect that seems to thrill the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently crowed to reporters, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”) MGX, meanwhile, has used the Trump family’s World Liberty cryptocurrency to make a hefty investment in the crypto exchange Binance.

Now, with this $10 billion fee, it’s clear that the TikTok arrangement will be mutually beneficial. As the Journal reports, for advising on similar deals, investment bankers typically receive fees of less than 1 percent of the transaction value. Bank of America, for instance, is receiving $130 million for advising a $71.5 billion Norfolk Southern deal. That’s one of the largest transaction fees on record for a bank—and still remarkably lower than the Trump administration’s payout.

Administration officials told the Journal that the fee accurately reflects Trump’s role in preserving TikTok’s US operations while addressing lawmakers’ security concerns. When reached by the New York Times, spokespeople for Oracle, MGX and Silver Lake either declined to comment or did not respond.

2026-03-14 21:31:22

Federal Judge James Boasberg quashed two grand jury subpoenas on Friday afternoon that are part of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, finding ample evidence that the subpoenas were intended to harass or coerce Powell into lowering interest rates, with no evidence pointing toward wrongdoing.

“A mountain of evidence suggests that the dominant purpose is to harass Powell to pressure him to lower rates,” wrote Boasberg, a district court judge in Washington, DC, referencing many, many social media posts and statements urging Powell to lower interest rates and then demeaning him when he did not. “Against such extensive and persuasive evidence of improper motive, the Government counters with only a tenuous assertion of a legitimate purpose.” Even when invited to submit more evidence, Boasberg noted, prosecutors declined.

US attorney Jeanine Pirro immediately announced in a press conference that she would appeal the decision. Pirro, a longtime Trump toady, called Boasberg’s opinion a dangerous precedent. She insisted that the reasons for investigating Powell—that the Fed’s renovation project is far over-budget and that there may be discrepancies in testimony Powell gave about it to Congress last year—are legitimate grounds for an investigation. Now, she warned, judges would feel empowered to block DOJ’s grand jury investigations.

But Boasberg’s straight-talk opinion was a long time coming. The obvious result of a Justice Department co-opted by a corrupt president was always going to be a department that judges cannot trust. Boasberg’s decision rubs the shine off the Justice Department, exposing it for what it has become.

Boasberg, who already has a history with the lies and evasions of the Trump Justice Department, was remarkably frank about why he is not giving prosecutors the benefit of the doubt. He laid out quite clearly that Trump wants to get rid of Powell; that allegations against Powell originated with Bill Pulte, the same official who found bogus evidence for the department to go after several other of Trump’s political targets; and that the DOJ has a history of pursuing these phony prosecutions at Trump’s command.

“The President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this
troublesome Fed Chair,” Boasberg wrote. “He then suggested a specific line of investigation into him, which had been proposed by a political appointee with no role in law enforcement, who hinted that it could be a way to remove Powell. The President’s appointed prosecutor promptly complied.”

Boasberg found that the facts of this particular case pointed to improper motive. But he also looked at the bigger picture of the department’s actions in Trump’s second term. For one, Boasberg was clear-eyed about the connection between Trump’s wishes and DOJ’s deeds. “The U.S. Attorney was appointed by the President and can be fired by him,” he wrote, noting that the US attorney across the Potomac was pushed out for refusing to indict James Comey in what was clearly a political prosecution. “The signal to other U.S. Attorneys was hard to miss.” He further noted Pirro’s absurd investigation into six Democratic members of Congress over a video that Trump didn’t like—which a grand jury unanimously rejected. Boasberg likewise found it noteworthy that Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and that the department promptly complied.

This is the context in which Pirro seeks to investigate Powell: with the Justice Department’s prosecutorial reputation in tatters because it has taken up ridiculous case after ridiculous case for the obvious purpose of pursing people Trump doesn’t like. With regard to Powell, as Boasberg pointed out in his opinion, it’s about more than punishing an opponent: It’s about coercing a policy result that Trump doesn’t officially have the power to demand. In this case, the goal is circumventing the Fed’s independence and bulldozing his way to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy in the short term.

Trump insists on treating the Justice Department as his coterie of personal attorneys—he’s even appointed his personal attorneys to top DOJ posts—and Boasberg is treating it as such. This was the predictable outcome of the end of DOJ independence ushered in by both Trump and the Supreme Court.

Justice Department independence was always a norm, not a law. And so Trump’s determination to break down the traditional wall between White House and DOJ and direct investigations and prosecutions was always possible. But the result of an unrestrained and vengeful president taking over the department is that its prosecutors—as well as many of its other officials—lose their credibility.

The Supreme Court further urged the end of Justice Department independence in its immunity decision, Trump v. United States, in July 2024. In that decision, the court’s Republican-appointed majority found that the president could direct the DOJ to launch sham investigations and prosecutions, even in furtherance of a crime, and that this was within the president’s unassailable constitutional powers. It’s long been understood that the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. But in the immunity decision, Chief Justice John Roberts changed that: “The Attorney General…acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer,’” Roberts wrote.

Roberts’ view is truly an aberration in modern times—and far from what Congress envisioned when it created the Justice Department in 1870. In 2006, for example, the politically motivated firings of at least seven US attorneys exploded into a major scandal of undue political influence by George W. Bush’s White House. In such a world, judges might trust that a criminal investigation was legitimate. Instead, the blatant use of the Justice Department as a political weapon leads to the obvious conclusion that its actions must be closely scrutinized and possibly rejected.

The appeal of this case could pose a serious question for the Supreme Court, should it go that far. The majority has already rolled back the authority of the lower courts since Trump’s return to office, easing some of Trump’s illegal policies past the blockade of the lower courts. If so inclined, the justices could use this as an opportunity to once again make it harder for judges to stand in Trump’s way by adjusting the rules for when a district court judge can quash a grand jury subpoena.

The Supreme Court may not be inclined to do so; as this case demonstrates, it would make it easier for Trump to circumvent Federal Reserve independence that might imperil the economy. This very case seems to demonstrate a worst-case scenario for making it harder to stop improper prosecutions. The justices have signaled at least some dedication to Fed independence, a bedrock of our economic order. At the same time, Roberts is dedicated to empowering the president, even to break the law.

Whether or not this case ultimately reshapes the law, it is a stark declaration of the current state of the Justice Department and the Trump administration: a reputation so sullied by corrupt behavior that it is now imperiling its own corrupt ends.

2026-03-14 19:30:00

“Tell me that is a gorgeous country.” Dave Rogers, an Oregon farmer, points across an expanse of green ryegrass fields. “My goodness, look at that.” 

We’re walking along a stretch of land that is under contract for solar development by Hanwha Qcells, a Seoul-based firm known for opening the United States’ largest solar manufacturing facility in 2023. Rogers describes the new project, dubbed Muddy Creek Energy Park, as a “huge amount of construction, three miles of solar panels, a football field with hundreds of batteries” to be built. 

Rogers, a wiry man with tanned skin in a plaid shirt, is easily distracted by pointing out the local flora and fauna. He has spent the better part of two years fighting the project, pitting him against his neighbor John Langdon. 

Rogers has known Langdon, also a farmer, for Langdon’s entire life. Langdon’s late father was friends with many people now opposing his son’s choice to lease the family land for agrivoltaics, the integration of solar panels into farmland. It’s a practice seen by proponents as vital to expanding cheap renewable power. Several other landowners in the area—who are neither farmers nor locals—have also leased their land as part of the same solar project.

“The only local farmers who signed the [solar] lease,” Rogers says, are “terrible, terrible farmers.”

Neighborly love can go only so far, it seems. Rogers and Langdon have chosen not to name each other in several interviews, though each is aware I am speaking with the other.

When I return to the same spot next week, Langdon talks about his plans to grow crops and graze sheep under the panels. He’s the only landowner leasing to Hanwha Qcells who has committed to agrivoltaics, which he hopes will help keep the family farm viable and profitable; opponents of the project, he thinks, are overstating the blight and the risks. 

“My brother and I feel a huge responsibility to not only take care of the farm, but to move it in the future for the next generation,” he says. 

Langdon runs a website, Solar Saves Farms, that shares information about agrivoltaics; he frequently speaks with legislators about the promise he sees in the technology for the agricultural community and its farmland. “We have an equal message for left and right,” he tells me. “We are farmer-first.”

Rogers feels a similar weight of responsibility to the land. He has spent his life growing native plant seeds on his farm, which he sells to those pursuing wildlife conservation. And he has converted 750 acres of his farmland into a wildlife sanctuary for birds, selling seed blends to attract waterfowl for hunters; he sees conservation and hunting as entwined. Between pointing out birds, Rogers excitedly tells me about his plans to buy more land for conservation.

For Rogers, the agrivoltaics project, like any development, threatens birds. “There’s tens of thousands of waterfowl that use that area,” says Rogers, referring to the planned solar farm site. “If they’re allowed to do this, it’s gone.” (The effects of utility solar on birds are a point of dispute: Research has both found positive and negative effects on avian populations.)

When I drive through Rogers’ and Langdon’s farming community in Linn County, Oregon, I pass numerous signs from Rogers’ group, Friends of Gap Road, against the development.

Its members “discourage this project of taking valuable farmland and putting solar panels on it,” he says. “It’s contradictory to good sense.”

A registered PAC, Friends of Gap Road describes itself as an “informal association of ten local landowners.” It raises money to speak out against the development and donate to local candidates who support farmland conservation and wetland conservation, says Troy Jones, its director. Friends of Gap Road is supporting Angelita Sanchez, a Republican, in the race for Oregon House District 11; in that district’s last race, it supported an independent. But the PAC characterizes itself as single-issue around agricultural land use.

“This is a bipartisan issue,” Jones says. “We say that because we have people from the left fighting” with others from the right, he adds, citing the historically left-leaning 1000 Friends of Oregon, another group weighing in against the project.

Opposition to development is nothing short of a historical legacy for farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The state has myriad restrictions on development, especially around building on “prime” rural farmland—all originating in the valley in which Rogers and Langdon farm.

Oregon’s governor during the late ’60s, Tom McCall, ran against the encroachment of urban development on rural land, with the strong backing of the valley’s farmers. By 1973, the state legislature had passed the Oregon Land Use Act, which strictly regulates the conversion of agricultural land. Jones says his side feels that it is carrying the torch: “There’s still that same love of the beauty of Oregon—forest, beaches, and farmland—that we’re trying to retain here.”

Langdon says the well-coordinated opposition didn’t give him a chance to explain his view. “They all came out and immediately opposed the project,” he says. “All those people have my phone number, most of them I’ve known for years, and no one called me.”

Rogers and Langdon represent a wider fissure around the technology: While the majority of farmers are open to some amount of agrivoltaics, surveys show that at least 30 percent of American farmers are firmly opposed to trying it.

It’s because of the Oregon Land Use Act and subsequent legislation that solar developments of more than a dozen acres require public input, the approval of a seven-person local council, and developers’ demonstration of community benefit, especially advantageous location, and a minimal loss of farmland, alongside many other environmental considerations. 

That’s a large part of why the solar project on Langdon’s land hasn’t moved forward in the three years since it was proposed. Why, Langdon asks, do so many other voices get to dictate the choices he makes on his farm?

“It kind of bothered me that everyone has an involvement or an opinion or perception,” he says. “This is not their business. It’s our property.”

The idea of integrating solar farms with agriculture was first conceived in the 1980s by a pair of German researchers as a way to alleviate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The plan never panned out, but about a decade ago, scientists in Japan reconsidered the technology as a potential player in the urgent push to decarbonize the world economy. Over the past decade, it has spread rapidly across the globe.

Unlike solar installations on sunnier, less-vegetated deserts or those on developed areas, agrivoltaics in temperate areas like Oregon get an efficiency boost because the vegetation cools the systems. Not all crops are suited for it; some see a yield reduction, and those that demand a lot of sun—like corn, soybeans, and cotton—are a better match for wind turbines. But other plants can actually benefit from the unique microclimate under the solar panels. Oregon State University hydrologist John Selker is researching a solar array in Corvallis, not far from Langdon’s property; he found that soil under agrivoltaics held water more efficiently, describing the panels as “miniature greenhouses.” 

As of 2024, the last year for which statistics are available, there were more than 600 agrivoltaics sites in the United States producing 10 gigawatts of energy, enough to power 7.5 million homes—double the capacity of just four years before. But the US, where most agrivoltaics projects are still backed by university research or international firms like Hanwha Qcells, is only a small player compared with agrivoltaics leader China, which generates more than three times as much energy from such projects, or second-place France, which gets 20 percent of its solar power from agrivoltaics. 

Silicon Ranch is a rare exception: an American-owned solar firm that’s invested heavily in agrivoltaics. Established in 2011, the company built utility-scale solar across the South and in 2013 started a project next to Will Harris, a regenerative farmer in Georgia. Until then, Silicon Ranch had been managing vegetation under panels by spraying herbicides and mowing. Harris didn’t like the prospect. 

“I knew it could be done differently,” Harris says. He invited Reagan Farr, Silicon Ranch’s CEO, to learn more about grazing management. Silicon Ranch turned that project, and others, into agrivoltaics developments, three of which Harris is now contracted to graze. The company maintains an in-house sheep herd to graze the others. The practice, Harris says, has brought a much-needed influx of cash into those rural communities.

Loran Shallenberger, who leads the agrivoltaics program at Silicon Ranch, says he’s come to see it “as probably the single greatest opportunity for sheep production and land production in a generation.” 

Still, many farmers are skeptical. Those who adopt agrivoltaics often face community ostracism for its perceived effect on land and property values— lowering or raising them, depending on the complaint—and for risking the health of the land. Stories like Muddy Creek’s are playing out again and again across the country. One agrivoltaics project in Ohio was described by an opponent as “spitting in the face” of the county’s voters. In Kansas, an opponent said a solar project threatened “the character of our communities.”

In a comment to a state oversight body drafted by Portland attorney James L. Buchal, farmers opposed to Muddy Creek alleged that the solar project would harm local wildlife, pose a fire risk, leach toxic metals into the ecosystem, and lower nearby property values, in addition to being “aesthetically displeasing.” 

But Buchal isn’t just the lawyer for Friends of Gap Road: He’s a Republican politician known for successfully defending the leader of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, collaborators of the better-known Proud Boys, against charges of riot. Jones said Friends of Gap Road was unaware of Buchal’s other clients and hadn’t hired him for his political affiliations.

“He’s a force to be reckoned with,” Jones says.

The concerns about battery fires, toxic metals, and soil damage aren’t easy to definitively confirm or refute without many more years of testing, even if there isn’t yet much direct evidence to back them. Battery fires, for example, while highly publicized, are exceedingly rare in practice. 

In terms of agricultural viability, though, USDA research suggests that land with agrivoltaics projects continues to be used as farmland at high rates, and that only one percent of total domestic farmland would be required to meet the nation’s renewable energy needs. Initial research shows promising effects on soil quality. Long-term outcomes are much more opaque, especially since solar installations remain in place for 20 to 30 years.

“We know very little because there has been almost no published research on it,” says Lee Daniels, a Virginia Tech professor emeritus of soil science who has spent the last 40 years studying the effects of land disturbances like mining on soil and water quality.

There is a similar dearth of research on the long-term potential for toxic metals to leach from panels into soil. Ryan Stewart, another Virginia Tech scholar who works with Daniels, says that’s a concern he hears often from local farmers.

“There have been some studies saying that you basically have to mash up the panels into dust for this to be a concern,” Stewart says, but he cautions that research is still in early phases. Daniels agrees that it’s an “area that needs further work.”

Daniels and Stewart are collaborating on a multiyear study assessing the soil and water quality effects of utility-scale solar projects and how best to mitigate them. It’s already clear, Daniels argues, that proper siting and management can prevent the irreparable harms to the land that some farmers fear.

The best practices Daniels cites—leaving topsoil onsite, reducing cut-and-fill leveling—are what Langdon says he plans for his land.

“The land’s been here long before humans, and it’s going to be here for a long time,” Langdon says. “It may be in different uses or look different, but my brother and I truly look at it like we are stewards of the land.” 

Without proper management, Daniels acknowledges that the effects can be devastating. He has seen agrivoltaics projects remove nutrient-rich topsoil to level hilly properties, which can cut the land’s productivity by as much as half.

In a comment about the development plan, representatives from Hanwha Renewables emphasized that the project will entail minimum cut and fill because it’s on a flat site. “Topsoil will be retained and preserved to continue crop production for the duration of the operating period of the project,” they wrote.

“I think we can do solar well,” Daniels says. “I think we can minimize impacts. We need to move away from fossil fuels.”

As I walk the valley with Rogers, I probe him about some of that research. He may not be an expert on the science, he grants, but he doesn’t like the idea of his backyard becoming a “lab.”

Setting agrivoltaics aside, I ask him about transformation and development, full stop.

“Anything that changes the land offends me,” he says, “if it isn’t farming or wetlands.”

Langdon, when we take a similar walk, tells me that a major draw of the solar project is the thought that it will help him with farming and conservation. The current use of the valley is to conventionally farm grass seed, which isn’t a food source or native habitat for migratory birds, so solar provides an alternative.

The influx of cash from the solar lease allowed Langdon to plant 220 acres of more expensive Oregon wild rice, one of the same crops Rogers grows. “It’s been the biggest wildlife attraction that we could have imagined,” he says. He wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.

It all depends, of course, on whether the project goes through. Hanwha Qcells submitted its notice of intent to file an application for project back in 2023, which sparked the public backlash. Four months later, the state of Oregon responded with requirements needed for a formal application such as site studies, community comments, and local ordinances. Hanwha Qcells had a year to respond to the project order with an official application, but requested and got an extension.

Now, for the project to move forward, Hanwha Qcells will need to submit an official application by May. Friends of Gap Road posted about that nearing deadline on its Facebook page on January 27: “We are ready and prepared for this action. Please make sure you are ready to fight like hell!”

The future of agrivoltaics, like all clean energy in the United States, is in a weird spot. Shortly after I first visited the farmers, the USDA announced it would stop funding renewable energy projects on farmland. While Langdon’s array comes from an agreement with a private solar company, many farmers’ access to the technology depends on grants like these. The solar credit many farmers use has become more complicated under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. And then there’s the increase in overall solar costs thanks to tariffs.

In January, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek ordered state agencies to move faster on renewable energy projects. But Friends of Gap Road remains “cautiously optimistic” that it can stop the project, Jones says.

Although his father’s friends have become staunch opponents, Langdon says his dad would have been supportive. “He would be very disappointed to make the neighbors unhappy, because these are lifelong friends,” Langdon says, “but he’s a guy that’s going to do what he has to do to make a living and to make his farm better for the next generation and generations to come.”