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2026-04-19 20:00:00

This article was originally published as part of the Undark series “What I Left Out.” In this installment, journalist Beth Gardiner shares a story that didn’t make it into her recent book, Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tropodo is a pretty village of narrow streets and brightly colored houses, set amid lush green fields in the eastern part of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island. Tall chimneys puffing streams of black smoke jut up behind many of its homes, but they’re only noticeable from a distance, so they hardly mar the town’s rustic feel.

While most of my reporting has focused on where plastic comes from—the oil and petrochemical companies that are pushing ever more of it into our lives—I’ve come to Tropodo to see where some of the hundreds of millions of tons produced every year end up.

About 12 percent of plastic waste is burned globally, according to a landmark study based on data through 2015. Even when done in incinerators equipped with air scrubbers and filters, such burning is linked to higher rates of premature birth, congenital abnormalities including heart and neural tube defects, and may increase cancer risk for those living nearby, studies have found.

But when plastics—which a Nature study last year found can contain any of more than 16,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which may pose health concerns—are burned in low-tech furnaces lacking any pollution-reduction technology, the dangers are far greater.

That’s exactly what happens in Tropodo, a tofu production center where informal backyard factories use plastic as a fuel for making the soy-based staple.

Muhammad Gufron, a solidly built man with a wispy moustache, is the owner of a local tofu factory. He greets me in front of a mint green house, and a moment later I’m following him down a long alleyway, past laundry hanging in the sun, into a building whose brick walls have big gaps that give it an open-air feel.

Gufron, who’s in a powder blue T-shirt, navy shorts, and sandals, starts the tour of his factory by pointing me toward several small rooms where shredded plastic, faded to near-colorlessness, is heaped against walls and stuffed into sacks. All around this region, I’ve seen waste sorters spreading plastic in the sun, to dry it for use as fuel. I hadn’t really understood the need for that, but as Gufron leads me toward his furnace, it begins to make more sense.

Intense heat is coming off the blaze inside the black metal cylinder, and when he stuffs a batch of scrap in with a wooden stick, it crackles audibly. The steam this fire helps generate is used in the production process.

After a few minutes in Gufron’s factory, I already feel a headache building behind my eyes, and as we move from the boiler room toward the tofu production area, the smoke is so thick I pull a mask out of my bag and put it on, despite the stifling heat.

There are about two dozen people working here, and with water sloshing around the concrete floor, many wear high rubber boots. Gufron shows me the machine that grinds soybeans into powder, then combines it with water to create a thick white sludge. Workers stir big vats of that mixture, and I watch as a man in a white tank top uses a metal pan to skim foam off the top, then dumps it onto the floor.

Eventually, the paste is scooped into wooden draining racks lined with thin mesh. They’re stacked in piles, and liquid drips from them, leaving something recognizable as tofu, which women slice into chunks with metal grids.

Gufron leads me back up the alley, and we take seats on dark wooden chairs in his living room, where the pungent smell of plastic smoke drifts in through open double doors along with the bright sunshine. Speaking Indonesian, he tells me through a translator that Tropodo has been a tofu hub since the 1960s, and the village’s producers now process more than 30 tons of soybeans a day. He’s in his 50s and has owned this business—it’s called DY, his daughters’ initials—since 2007. Most of his customers, he tells me, are in nearby Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, where he sells to markets as well as individuals.

His parents were tofu-makers too, and when he was a boy, their factory burned rice husks. But they began using plastic in the 1980s, so when he started his own company, he did too. He later switched to wood, but when his wood supplier closed, he went back to plastic. “It’s good, and cheap,” he tells me. All Tropodo’s tofu factories burn plastic, he says, and he doesn’t see any problem with it.

Much of the plastic Gufron and factory owners like him use is waste from overseas—packaging tossed away in places such as the United States, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. He buys it from local sorters who purchase it from paper recycling companies. Plastic scrap is often mixed in with the bundles of waste paper those companies import, and they must remove it before processing the paper. Indonesian regulations limit such contamination to 2 percent of any shipment, and while the industry insists violations are rare, Daru Setyorini, the environmentalist and researcher who has accompanied me to Tropodo, says that in reality, the amount of plastic can far exceed that limit.

Gufron steps out for a minute and returns with two big bags of fried tofu chunks, little red chilis mixed in. Setyorini appears to tuck in happily, but I’m wary, so I just have one, although the salty squares are tasty. My restraint may be silly, since I’ve already eaten plenty of local tofu.

Unsurprisingly, such burning introduces toxins into the food chain. Setyorini’s research and advocacy group, Ecoton, or Ecological Observation and Wetlands Conservation, has found microplastic fibers, filaments, and fragments in Tropodo tofu, although the group has not yet analyzed their chemical composition.

Along with several partner organizations, Ecoton has also tested eggs from chickens foraging in Tropodo’s plastic ash-strewn soil. Ash from plastic burning can contain dioxins and heavy metals, the Annals of Global Health reported in 2024. In Tropodo’s eggs, Ecoton and its collaborators found dangerous chemicals including PCBs—banned globally in the 2000s because they are believed to cause cancer and problems with the immune, nervous, reproductive, and endocrine systems—and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS or forever chemicals, which are linked to conditions including reduced fertility, high cholesterol, and cancer.

The researchers also found the second-highest dioxin level ever detected in an egg in Asia; the highest was in Vietnam, at a former US military base tainted by historic use of the defoliant Agent Orange, where a 10-year cleanup project began in 2019.

An adult eating an egg like the one found in Tropodo would exceed Europe’s acceptable maximum intake of chlorinated dioxins—chemicals linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and hormonal changes—by 70 times, the groups reported. The eggs also contained short-chain chlorinated paraffins and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are both used as flame retardants in plastic and are linked to hormonal disruption, developmental and neurological damage, and cancer.

Chickens wander everywhere in Indonesian villages, and Tropodo is far from the only place where they peck through toxic ash. Many rural areas lack garbage collection, so households there often burn their waste. The faint whiff of that smoke hangs everywhere, and I often see hens munching their way through the blackened remains of such fires.

The threat goes far beyond Indonesia, of course, to everywhere plastic is burned out in the open. In Accra, Ghana, for example, researchers testing eggs near one of the world’s largest electronic waste scrapyards, where workers burn plastic culled from discarded devices, found chlorinated dioxin levels more than three times Tropodo’s very dangerous levels.

Burning plastic can also put a cocktail of dangerous chemicals into the air, including dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated furans, and hydrogen cyanide. That may be why, when a team publishing in the journal Environment International tested the Ghanaian e-waste workers’ blood, they found dioxins there too.

In Tropodo, Ecoton measured levels of the tiny airborne particulates known as PM2.5—which are linked to a huge range of health problems including heart attacks, strokes, many kinds of cancer, diabetes, and dementia—at more than 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter. That’s nearly 20 times Indonesia’s legal limit, and 30 times the stricter American 24-hour standard. It’s a hint of why the Annals of Global Health review called open burning of plastic “an urgent global health issue.”

There are surely a host of dangerous pollutants in the plumes of black smoke billowing from ramshackle sheds that line the roads in Tamansari, about 385 miles west of Tropodo, outside the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

The sheds house informal limestone kilns, and when I step out of a car in front of one, it takes me a few minutes to understand what’s happening. Men working in pairs haul loads of stone on white tarps they lift by hand or hang from poles slung over their shoulders. They dump the rock into a deep, brick-sided pit, or use a rope-and-pulley setup to lower it to a worker at the bottom.

There are several pits, and smoke pours out of the one furthest back from the road. Later, I would watch the video I made over and over, shocked anew each time by the thickness of the smoke, and how rapidly it rolls from the pit. The men in the foreground pay no attention to the foul plume as they hoist load after load of stone.

One of the workers, a man named Amin, whose T-shirt and long shorts are covered in dust, takes a break to speak to me. The limestone, he says in Indonesian, is quarried locally and fired here into lime, a powdery substance used to make cement.

Humans have been baking limestone for millennia, both for construction materials and to reduce the acidity of agricultural fields. When Amin’s crew has filled a pit with rocks, it’s covered and then heated from below for two days and nights. Amin, who’s in his 50s (like many Indonesians, he has only one name), tells me he’s worked here for 25 years, although he’s only hired for short gigs, as part of a team of men, each of whom gets about $6 for 10 hours.

He’s seen colleagues suffer broken bones or become permanently disabled by falling stone. Even without injuries, “it’s a very hard job,” he says, “but I need it.” The smoke bothers him, sometimes making it hard to breathe, and it doesn’t help that similar kilns pollute the air near his home.

As he goes back to work, I pick my way around the side of the kiln and down a steep hill littered with plastic debris, along with two young women from the Nexus3 Foundation, a Bali-based research and advocacy group. I see now how the stone is heated. Beneath each pit, a fire roars inside a big furnace, and at the hatch of the ones currently burning, a man tosses in plastic or shoves it with a long pole.

The plastic is piled all around, and includes diapers, stacked-up tires and pieces of brightly colored foam. Eventually, we drive a few minutes to another kiln, where a pit has just finished cooling, and the stone has turned white and crumbly, some already disintegrated into to powder. Men shovel it into baskets their colleagues haul up to ground level.

Kilns like these are informal businesses, unregistered and unregulated by government officials. But while the conditions in Tamansari were shocking, I was even more stunned to learn later that such small-scale operations are far from the only ones burning plastic to produce lime for cement.

In fact, what I saw by the side of an Indonesian road was one tiny piece of a major global push—by huge multinational companies and many governments—to fuel cement production with discarded plastic. Industry representatives portray it as a green win-win that gets rid of waste while shrinking the climate footprint of a process that would otherwise be powered by coal or petroleum coke.

In part because of that fossil fuel use, cement-making accounts for about 8 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions—as well as air pollution that often sickens those living near plants. So it’s certainly a sector crying out for a green overhaul. But with its toxic emissions, and a hefty climate hit to boot, plastic burning brings plenty of harms of its own.

To be sure, industrial-scale kilns are subject to regulations on air quality, ash disposal, and worker safety, and are undoubtedly far better run than the informal ones I saw. But while advocates for plastic’s use as a fuel claim the kilns’ high temperatures burn off toxic gases, environmentalists note that cement-making is a notoriously dirty industry, where standards are lax, and often poorly enforced. Electrifying furnaces, ideally with renewable power, is a far better answer, they say.

Another worry is that the industry’s appetite for energy will help lock us into a future of ever-growing plastic production by creating a market for cheap trash.

Stuffing waste into cement kilns isn’t a new idea. American and European producers started doing it in the 1970s and ‘80s as a way to save money during a global energy crunch.

As the volume of plastic trash has skyrocketed in recent years, it’s accounted for a growing share of kilns’ consumption. It’s hard to know exactly how much plastic cement makers burn, since industry figures often group it under the broad heading of “alternative fuel,” a category that also includes discarded clothes, tires, wood, paper, and other garbage. A 2021 Reuters investigation reported “alternative fuel” accounted for about half the cement industry’s fuel use in Europe, and 15 percent in the United States.

One form that energy takes is “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, a mixture of packaging, other plastic waste, scrap wood, and paper that often ends up in cement kilns. More than $5.4 billion of RDF—upwards of 45 percent of which is consumed by the cement industry—is sold every year, and that market’s value is expected to double in a decade, one analysis estimated. “Governments are promoting actions to reduce the amount of materials being sent to landfills, and we are one solution,” the global sustainability director of a cement company told Grist.

The relentless push for new ways to make garbage go up in smoke is a natural outgrowth of industry’s long-standing effort to frame plastic pollution as nothing more than a waste management problem.

But that view only holds up if one disregards burning’s impact on the climate, air quality, soil, and human health—not to mention the harms wrought by unchecked production. Activists like to say incineration just moves the landfill from the ground to the sky. That sounds apt.

2026-04-19 04:56:19

President Trump signed an executive order on Saturday calling for the acceleration of research on certain psychedelic drugs as treatments for depression and other conditions. Podcaster Joe Rogan stood with him as he signed the order—and Trump indicated that Rogan was a major inspiration behind the push to fast-track legalizing ibogaine, which is used outside the United States to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Rogan has championed ibogaine for years. A year ago, on his podcast, he said “Ibogaine, in particular, has helped a lot of people. It gives you, like, a review of your life, apparently.” Two weeks ago, he interviewed the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, who also stood by as Trump signed his order to ease access to the drug.

Rogan’s relationship with Trump has recently been strained, as the podcaster critiqued the president’s war on Iran. (Trump, in response, referred to Rogan as a “liberal,” a charge Rogan would likely deny.) But Rogan’s texts to Trump, he told reporters, were what brought this to fruition: “Sounds great, do you want FDA approval?” Rogan said Trump responded. “It was literally that quick.”

Rogan isn’t the only nationally prominent figure pushing psychedelics. The drugs’ path to legitimacy is fueled by early-stage investors hoping to stake their claim to a market many view as the next cannabis.

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has spent the better part of the past decade investing heavily in psychedelic pharmaceutical companies. He’s a major backer of Compass Pathways, a British company seeking to commercialize psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, in particular for therapeutic use. He’s also invested in AtaiBeckley, a German company working on hallucinogens. On Thursday, the stocks of both companies spiked on news that Trump would likely be giving his stamp of approval to ibogaine this weekend.

Another financial beneficiary might be the state of Texas, which announced it would be conducting its own ibogaine clinical trials in late March, to the tune of $50 million. And then there’s the Mercer Family Foundation, a major conservative grantmaker that helped get Trump elected, which has donated over $1 million toward psychedelics-related treatment for PTSD in combat veterans.

At the White House Saturday, Trump didn’t talk much about the money behind all this. Instead, he asked if he could get some ibogaine.

“Can I have some, please?” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes…I don’t have time to be depressed. If you stay busy enough, maybe that’s what works too, that’s what I do.”

2026-04-19 03:31:09

The Department of Homeland Security just rolled out a new website for its city-occupying task forces that looks, more than anything, like a vibe-coded pitch deck. Launched on Friday, HSTF.gov was first announced on the FBI’s X account.

We don’t negotiate. We dismantle. The site’s slogan is displayed in the same sans-serif font stylings as direct-to-consumer deodorant companies and AI-powered lease abstraction platforms. The main page is largely consumed by a macho image, presumably AI-generated, of gas-masked officers with AR-15 style weapons advancing in formation through a cloud of tear gas.

Notably, it makes no mention of ICE, deportations, or even immigration. Instead, it frames the Homeland Security task forces as crusaders against foreign cartels, drug smuggling, and human trafficking. Yet the effort is inseparable from the multiagency task forces that have kidnapped and detained people across Minneapolis, Memphis, and Los Angeles. The connection isn’t evident if you look at HSTF.gov, but the FBI’s own website notes that DHS “formed Homeland Security Task Forces in response to Executive Order 14159.”

That’s an order signed by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office. It’s titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and it explicitly describes a plan for deportation, incarceration, and removal of unprecedented numbers of immigrants.

The brand new website describes the Homeland Security Task Force as a “permanent, interagency law enforcement task force created by executive order to combat transnational criminal organizations—including cartels, trafficking networks, and foreign terrorist organizations—across all 52 U.S. states and territories.” But it omits a key line from the HSTF objectives cited in Trump’s executive order: to use “all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.”

The new website’s creators are familiar characters: The head of the National Design Studio, a year-old agency created by executive decree, is Joe Gebbia, a former DOGE man, current billionaire, and member of the Airbnb and Tesla boards. Then there’s Nate Brown, creative director, who used to work with Kanye West and has pivoted to government tasks. Edward Coristine, the 20-year-old perhaps best known by his DOGE-era nickname, “Big Balls,” says he’s the engineering lead on the project. 

In an interview earlier this month with far-right influencer Nick Shirley, Coristine outlined his mission as a federal vibecoder. “We’re actually setting Americans up for growth moving forward, and to believe in the capitalist system and, like, see how it can actually work for them.” He’s been working 14-hour days, he added, and “AI is super important, I use it every day.” 

Those hours of AI-assisted labor have delivered (among other things) a shiny new website hailing the 8,500 DHS “agents and analysts” coming to a city near you. Among the goals listed is “dismantling cross-border trafficking and smuggling networks” with a “priority focus” on those involving children—although, in practice, Homeland Security agents have spent months invading cities far from the border and locking children in detention centers.

A year ago, when the National Design Studio was first announced, Paula Scher of the graphic design firm Pentagram told Fast Company that the group’s remit—to make America’s websites beautiful again—didn’t land well, given its work on behalf of a government dedicated to deprivation. “You can’t talk about people losing their Medicare and have a slick website,” Scher said at the time. “It just doesn’t go.” 

According to official National Design Studio materials, though, that’s the goal: “To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.”

An Apple Store does not lock up and deport people, but maybe that’s beside the point.

2026-04-18 19:30:00

Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.

The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.

No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.

NASA has always relied on partnerships with private companies, but the number of unique contractors has dropped by 38 percent between 2021 and 2024 as contracts with SpaceX ballooned. According to a Washington Post investigation, Musk’s company has received nearly $15 billion from the agency all told, with contract values doubling at the inception of Artemis.

“NASA helped build out SpaceX,” says Casey Dreier, who leads the space policy team at the Planetary Society. In some ways, he sees this relationship as an exemplar of how NASA aims to interact with private companies; the partnership, he says, “has significantly lowered launch costs, increased reliability, and pursued real innovation in reusability.”

But SpaceX contracting also represents a worst-case scenario. A former NASA financial officer found that while the company had driven down the cost of launching things into space, it wasn’t passing those savings along to NASA. Even adjusting for inflation, SpaceX has been charging NASA more each year for the same services. And it can keep raising prices, because it has put competing ventures out of business. This one company “now facilitates US access to space,” Dreier says.

The technologies that allowed SpaceX to leap ahead were developed using federal funds, yet Musk owns the rights to them. “Musk can do basically whatever he wants with the rocket launches to space, something previously only the domain of national superpowers,” Dreier says. “The government, by policy, concentrated immense power in the hands of a single individual.”

The value of the Artemis contracts have grown over the last year as NASA, like other federal scientific agencies, finds itself in a tricky position. Because Congress rejected the president’s proposed budget cuts, NASA has the funding to carry out its missions—a $24.4 billion annual budget, plus a bump of nearly $10 billion over the next six years from the One Big Beautiful Bill. But their staff took a large hit at the hands of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The agency lost about 20 percent of its workforce, including many senior and specialized employees trained to support highly technical missions like getting back to the moon. This scenario “almost certainly will increase reliance on contractors,” Dreier says—though DOGE ended many NASA contracts as well.

In the name of efficiency, the Trump administration also eliminated NASA’s entire Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, whose economists analyzed and managed NASA’s relationship with the space technology market. This included assessing contracts, which typically cost taxpayers more than in-house work—especially when there’s no competition.

This doesn’t leave NASA many places to turn when the company of a billionaire who famously overpromises doesn’t deliver. An analysis from the NASA Office of the Inspector General expressed concerns that SpaceX would not even be able to meet the already extended deadlines for the moon lander, especially as there is “little margin for error in completing the remaining work.”

To keep the Artemis III mission on track for mid-2027, NASA is “exploring options for accelerating lander development,” per the IG report. So far, this has meant soliciting proposals from the only two companies with the capacity to work on such gear. One is SpaceX. The other is Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, which is already two years behind on its contracts for Artemis V.

2026-04-18 19:00:00

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

Picture yourself in a windswept forest. Leaves are rustling and trunks are creaking as trees sway to and fro. This oscillation might seem precarious, but it’s actually an ancient adaptation: If pines and firs and all the others were perfectly stiff, a gust would snap them. So instead, they flex. 

Now teleport yourself to the top floor of a skyscraper during the same windstorm, ever so slightly bending in the same way. A tree’s clever evolutionary trick, you see, has made the modern metropolis possible: As towers reached higher and higher in the early 20th century, architects used not wood but steel to create giants that would similarly flex in hurricane-force winds and as earthquakes rattled their foundations.

But as the world gets hotter and wildfires more intense, architects are turning back to trees for more than inspiration. Engineered materials like cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber, in which layers of wood are glued together, create beams that are tough and somewhat flexible, yet lightweight. They’re so strong, in fact, that designers are crafting wood structures that are 15, 20, even 25 stories high: In 2022, the 284-foot Ascent MKE Building opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, becoming the world’s tallest timber building.

It’s exactly because the world is getting hotter that architects are pushing the limits of how tall they can build with “mass timber,” as it’s known in the field: As trees grow, they capture planet-warming carbon, which is then permanently incorporated into the edifice. To that end, last month crews completed a 10-story building in Vancouver, called the Hive, which is now North America’s tallest brace-framed, seismic-force-resisting (meaning it shrugs off earthquakes) timber structure. “I think we’re going back to how we used to build, which was with more wood,” Lindsay Duthie, an architect at Dialog, the firm that designed the property.

For thousands of years, humans were stuck with natural building materials: wood, adobe, granite. The industrial revolution unlocked the power of steel, but at an environmental cost, as its production has spewed heaps of carbon. Laminated timber, on the other hand, is not only more environmentally friendly, but also perfectly safe for structures much larger than your house.

Because this resource is engineered, it can come from small- and medium-sized trees. That is, instead of having to form single beams from huge old-growth behemoths, bits can be sliced, layered, and glued together. This harvesting can help improve forest health, as agencies like the US Forest Service remove some stands to prevent overcrowding and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. (A long modern history of suppressing fires has nixed the ecosystem’s natural way of thinning itself. Lightning strikes, for instance, would ignite blazes that cleared out some vegetation while leaving the forest intact. This spurred new growth and attracted grazing animals like deer, boosting biodiversity.)

While it takes a lot of work to mine and process the iron needed to make steel—a process that scars the landscape—wood structures use material from ecosystems that, if managed properly, can keep growing more cross-laminated timber for more construction.

The Hive, though, can’t resist seismic forces with wood alone. It’s equipped with Tectonus dampers, which are essentially giant shock absorbers that dissipate energy and recenter the building after an earthquake. Elsewhere, on a large shake table at the University of California, San Diego, researchers deployed a different technique in a 10-story timber structure. At the building’s core sat a large piece of mass timber, called a rocking wall, anchored to the foundation with high-strength steel rods. The researchers simulated 88 earthquakes, and the timber building survived them all with no damage. “It performed phenomenally,” said Shiling Pei, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.

That structural integrity is not only important for keeping occupants safe, but for sustaining the sustainability of a mass timber structure. If an earthquake damages a building, repairing it will result in CO2 emissions. Worse, you may have to demolish the structure and start from scratch. A properly designed timber building can capture carbon in its wood—and keep it there for years and years. “You build not only a sustainable structure, but also a resilient structure,” said Alessandro Palermo, a structural engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who studies mass timber.

Which is all not to say that one of these wooden buildings is fully devoid of steel. The timber beams are attached with metal brackets, for instance. And timber buildings still sit on sturdy foundations of concrete, the production of which releases enormous amounts of carbon, though engineers are working to make it more environmentally friendly.

But isn’t building a giant structure out of wood just asking for it to go up in flames? No, because building regulators in British Columbia or anywhere else wouldn’t approve these plans if they were excessively flammable. And laminated timber is designed to form a protective char layer if it catches on fire, insulating the structural integrity of a beam from the flames. “If you have a campfire, you end up at the end of the night with black logs,” Duthie said. “That’s the char layer that actually acts as a protective coating that prevents it from burning further.”

And compared to the sterility of exposed steel and concrete in a building’s interior spaces, wood has a fundamentally different feel for the occupants. “It has a tactile quality about it that people sort of want to interact with,” said Katie Mesia, firmwide design resilience co-leader at the architecture company Gensler. “I think that is just part of who we are as humans. That desire to be close to nature has always been there.”

One day soon, then, you might find yourself safely in a mass timber building—the evolutionary brilliance of a forest repackaged with human ingenuity. 

2026-04-18 15:00:00

In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry. 

This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025.