Richard Broughton has been nosing around this neighbourhood for 22 years. He gossips about inhabitants past and present, reeling off information about their relationship status, openness to visitors, brawls and neighbourly disputes. “They used to have a big punch up in spring here,” he says, pointing out where one family’s territory ends and the next begins.

Some areas are eerily quiet, with popular old haunts lying uninhabited. “I always get a bit of a pang now, walking through here and it’s empty. It’s like walking down your local high street and seeing your favourite shops are closed and the pub is boarded up.”

Broughton’s domain is not a city block but an ancient woodland called Monks Wood, in Cambridgeshire. The inhabitants are marsh tits: tiny songbirds, each weighing about the same as two sheets of A4 paper.

Broughton holds up an old Nokia phone and plays a warning call. The bird he’s searching for is a kind of avian Hugh Hefner: nine years old in May and currently hitched up with a one-year-old. He quickly comes to inspect Broughton. Marsh tits are plucky and territorial, with a distinctive black cap and Inspector Clouseau-style moustaches – as soon as they hear the alarm call they race to investigate.

Soon, however, the calls of this family network of birds may only exist in the plastic casing of Broughton’s Nokia. More than 70 million birds have disappeared from the UK’s skies since 1970. The delicate calls of marsh tits – and other songbirds – are becoming harder to find, as populations plummet. The story from this wood is being played out nationally, as human noise gets louder and the sounds of nature vanish.

Broughton, who works at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, is Britain’s leading expert on these woodlands, and this family of marsh tits has been studied in more detail and for longer than any others in the country. The sound Broughton is playing is the noise of a bird he recorded 20 years ago. During that time he has attached coloured bands to the legs of more than 1,600 marsh tits to identify them. Only 1.7% of those birds are still alive.

The project was set up in 2002 to study the then-thriving population, but they started seriously declining 10 years in. When he started the study there were 22 pairs in this wood. Last year there were fewer than 10. The UK breeding population has declined by 80% in the last 55 years, so these encounters are increasingly rare.

By 2042 the population is projected to be zero. “We know what’s coming. Within my lifetime they will probably disappear. It can be distressing to watch because you get to know their lives and relationships,” says Broughton.

The decline of these birds is a case study in how increasing human activity can drive a species toward extinction. Their dwindling numbers are partly driven by growing competition from blue tits and great tits, which are benefiting from being fed by humans in their gardens (marsh tits wouldn’t venture into people’s gardens for food).

Then there are the declines of insects – a crucial food source. The birds rely on hawthorn-dwelling caterpillars to get in good condition for spring and then feed their freshly hatched young – but climate breakdown now means the hawthorn is coming into leaf long before the birds would normally be nesting. This woodland is a small island of suitable habitat surrounded by intensively farmed arable land. Marsh tits will not fly over open farmland, they only follow hedges and woodlands, so this population is becoming increasingly isolated and incestuous.

The study is also a microcosm of what’s happening more widely. On average there are 37% fewer woodland birds in our woods compared with 1970, with declines accelerating in the past five years.

“These birds are telling us that something serious is happening in the woods,” says Broughton. When he first came to the wood in 1999 there were nightingales, willow tits, hawfinches and lesser-spotted woodpeckers – birds that had been here for hundreds or thousands of years. “Now they’ve all gone,” he says. “Marsh tits will probably be next.” The removal of hedges, woodlands and increased numbers of deer are all reducing the size and quality of their habitats.

We spot Hefner 200 metres from where he was first ringed, nearly a decade ago. This five hectares (12 acres) of wood is this old male’s entire universe; he’s probably never left it, and knows it inside-out, right down to every tree and shrub. Over winter he will hide tens of thousands of seeds, a bit like a squirrel. “If they’re not on their territory they’re dead,” says Broughton. In that sense, they’re easy to monitor.

In the neighbouring territory there was a love story with a pair that were together for eight years. They were never apart. Then, one day, she disappeared. “It brought a lump to my throat,” says Broughton. The male appeared bereft, and didn’t pair up with the available females around him. Two months later he died too.

Broughton says he sometimes finds it hard to conduct science and see this happening on our watch. The wood is full of memories of particular birds, families and nests that are now long gone. “There is an emotional toll. I can’t feel neutral about it, I can’t just treat them as datapoints,” he says. “It’s my own ‘silent spring’.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

All of the UK’s native breeds of chicken, duck, geese and turkey are under threat because of bird flu, a report from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) has found.

The disease, which has swept the globe after it originated in poultry farms in Asia, has caused devastating declines in bird populations. It has also now jumped to mammals and some cases have been found in humans, though it has not been found to be spreading from human to human.

The annual watchlist produced by the RBST also highlights concerns for native pig breeds. British Pig Association data shows declining numbers overall for the priority category pig breeds, including the Berkshire pig (total sows down from 363 in 2021 to 288 in 2023) and the Tamworth pig (total sows reduced from 304 in 2020 to 239 in 2023).

These declines continue after the pig market failure caused by rising costs, meaning farmers were being offered less than the cost of production for their products. The UK pig population has fallen from about 8m in the 1990s to just over 5m today.

The Rare Breeds Survival Trust chief executive, Christopher Price, said: “Today’s new RBST watchlist reflects the major challenges faced by people keeping pigs and poultry over the past two years, notably the avian flu outbreaks and the sustained increase in animal feed and husbandry costs. We have moved all native poultry breeds to the priority category as we continue providing urgent support for these irreplaceable breeds’ conservation.

“Seven of the UK’s 11 native pig breeds remain in the priority category, with most of the rare pig breeds now showing a sustained downward trend in total sow numbers. The at-risk Welsh pig, for example, has fallen from 457 sows in 2020 to 296 in 2023. We must reverse these worrying declines before it is too late.”

Native breeds of livestock are often used in rewilding projects for grazing because they tend to be hardier, so do not have to be kept indoors. Native poultry breeds are often seen as more sustainable and preferable to broiler chickens from an animal welfare perspective because they grow more slowly and tend to be kept free range.

Tom Davis, and RBST trustee and farm manager at Mudchute Park & Farm in east London, said: “The UK’s brilliant array of rare and native poultry is under serious threat. Under the continued threat of avian influenza, there is a clear decline in active breeding programmes – and when breed populations are so low, losing flocks can be devastating. Collecting comprehensive rare breed poultry data to steer conservation efforts is a serious challenge, and we really need more people to be encouraged to keep these birds and work with RBST and breed societies to help conserve them for the generations of the future.”

Healthier ready-to-eat meals could cut EU emissions by 48m tonnes annually and save customers €2.8bn (£2.4bn) each year, as well as reducing disease, a report has found.

Fast food and ready meals provide more than a sixth of the EU’s calories but contain far more salt and meat than doctors recommend, according to an analysis from the consultancy Systemiq commissioned by environmental nonprofit organisations Fern and Madre Brava.

They found that placing minimum health and sustainability standards on the companies who sell most of them would yield “huge” benefits to society.

“Making ready meals healthier and more sustainable is a no-regrets policy,” said Eduardo Montero Mansilla from the Spanish Consumers and Users’ Federation, one of 10 non-governmental organisations that co-authored the report. “We can improve the health of people and the planet at affordable prices.”

The report explored the effects of making big food companies comply with diets from the World Health Organization, which aims to avoid malnutrition and non-communicable disease, and the EAT-Lancet Commission, which tries to reduce environmental as well as human harm.

In both cases, they found that ready-to-eat meals would need to contain about half as many refined grains and two-thirds less meat, on average, as well as “significantly” more legumes.

While the report found that would save consumers €2.8bn in cheaper food and cut emissions by 48m tonnes each year, it did not count the additional economic benefits of hospitals spending less money on treating patients and employers losing less money from workers taking sick days.

“We are currently living in a diet-related health crisis,” said Alba Gil from the European Public Health Alliance, which co-authored the report. “Our dietary habits shape our health, and therefore our future. It makes only sense that policymakers regulate the environments where we consume food to make it healthy and affordable by design.”

Livestock are responsible for 12-20% of planet-heating pollution and increase the levels of some heart diseases and cancers in rich countries where the average person eats more meat than doctors recommend.

Climate scientists are clear that swapping from animal to plant-based proteins is a powerful step to keep the planet from heating, though doctors are unsure just how little meat is best for human health. The EAT-Lancet Commission, which is meeting this year to propose a wider range of diets and address concerns about micronutrient shortfalls in its planetary health diet, currently advises eating meat about once a week and fish twice a week.

The NGOs called on the EU to require big food companies to comply with health and sustainability guidelines for ready-made meals sold in the EU. The report did not analyse how consumers would respond to such a proposal.

Paul Behrens, an environmental change researcher at Leiden University who has studied food systems, who was not involved in the study, said: “This report is pragmatic in suggesting that not every meal has to be optimally healthy, but that the overall offering of caterers and retailers should meet dietary guidelines.”

He added: “If policymakers followed this advice, it would create a far healthier food culture that would benefit the planet, our wellbeing, and our wallets.”

The Albanese government has further delayed a commitment to rewrite Australia’s failing national environment laws.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government would introduce legislation in coming weeks to create two previously announced bodies – an environment protection agency and a second organisation called Environment Information Australia, which will provide public data on ecosystems, plants and animals.

But a commitment to introduce a suite of laws to address Australia’s extinction crisis, including new national environmental standards against which development proposals would be assessed, has been pushed back to an unspecified date.

At a media conference on Tuesday, Plibersek said the announcement of legislation for a national EPA – to be known as Environment Protection Australia – was a “historic day for the environment”.

But she did not guarantee that the broader package of environment laws, including the national standards, would be introduced before the next election. “They’ll be introduced when they’re ready,” she said.

The delay to wider reforms sparked accusations that the government was failing to deliver the overarching environment reform it announced in 2022. The Greens’ environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, accused Labor of breaking a promise.

James Trezise, the director of the not-for-profit Biodiversity Council, said the delay was a “significant step back from what the Albanese government committed to in its nature positive plan”.

“Nature in Australia is in crisis and can’t afford delays in the comprehensive reforms needed to fix our weak and broken environmental laws,” he said.

Plibersek had initially promised to introduce new laws – first in draft form for consultation and then to the parliament – by last year.

Speaking in 2022, she said multiple reviews had shown the existing law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, was “broken”. She promised changes in 2023 that would be better for business and the environment, including the introduction of national environmental standards, faster decision-making and improved trust and integrity in the system.

But the plans have faced a public backlash from the Western Australian Labor premier, Roger Cook, and the state’s powerful mining and resources industries.

On Tuesday, Plibersek said splitting up the changes would allow more time for consultation and to “make sure we get this right”.

“When I first announced the nature-positive plan, I said it would take a bit of cooperation, compromise and common sense to deliver. That’s exactly how we’re approaching the rollout,” she said.

Plibersek said the EPA legislation would create an agency with “strong new powers to better protect nature”, including being able to issue environment protection orders – effectively “stop-work” orders. She said the laws would allow the EPA to act as a delegate for the minister and make decisions on whether development proposals went ahead.

The agency would initially be focused on cracking down on illegal land clearing and enforcing environmental offsetting conditions. A government audit found about one in seven developments approved under the existing laws could be in breach of offset conditions that required some form of compensation in return for being allowed to damage nature.

Plibersek said the EPA chief would be an independent statutory appointment similar to the Australian federal police commissioner “to make sure no government can interfere with the new agency’s important enforcement work”. The agency would initially sit within the environment department before becoming an independent statutory authority in July 2025.

Plibersek said the second new body, Environment Information Australia, would release a national state of the environment report every two years. Its primary role would be to provide “up-to-the-minute” information on Australia’s environment to assist the public and business.

The Coalition’s environment spokesperson, Jonathon Duniam, said the announcement showed Plibersek had failed as environment minister, describing it as the creation of a “new bureaucracy with no new laws to administer”.

Hanson-Young said the changes did not go far enough to protect nature and accused the government of giving in to a two-year-long campaign by “the mining industry and big developers”. She said the government was engaged in “piecemeal tinkering”, when it had promised a full environment law reform package.

“Labor promised to fix Australia’s broken environment laws, but without stopping native forest logging and fossil fuel expansions, the government will be failing to protect our planet and failing to keep its promise to the Australian people,” she said.

Conservation groups called on the government to deliver the promised full package of reform before the election and expressed disappointment over the delays.

The Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said the promised crackdown on illegal land clearing and the establishment of an EPA were “welcome and necessary”, but without comprehensive reform, the agency would be “enforcing a flawed and ineffective law that still needs serious surgery”.

Environment groups are expected to air their concerns with the changes at a Senate inquiry hearing into the extinction crisis on Wednesday.

One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves.

Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt. Dusty shrublands run into sleepy residential streets, which run into neat fields of cotton and alfalfa.

Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land here in Cibola. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14m gross profit. More than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing, through a canal system, to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.

A Guardian investigation into the unprecedented water transfer, and how it took shape, reveals that Greenstone strategically purchased land and influence to advance the deal. The company was able to do so by exploiting the arcane water policies governing the Colorado River.

Experts expect that such transfers will become more common as thirsty towns across the west seek increasingly scarce water. The climate crisis and chronic overuse have sapped the Colorado River watershed, leaving cities and farmers alike to contend with shortages. Amid a deepening drought and declines in the river’s reservoirs, Greenstone and firms like it have been discreetly acquiring thousands of acres of farmland.

As US states negotiate how they will divide up the river’s dwindling supplies, officials challenging the Greenstone transfer in court fear it will open the floodgates to many more private water sales, allowing investors to profit from scarcity. The purchases have alarmed local residents, who worry that water speculators scavenging agricultural land for valuable water rights will leave rural communities like Cibola in the dust.

“Here we are in the middle of a drought and trying to preserve the Colorado River, and we’re allowing water to be transferred off of the river,” said Regina Cobb, a former Republican state representative who has tried to limit transfers. “And in the process, we’re picking winners and losers.”

In February, a federal judge ruled that the Cibola-Queen Creek transfer was done without proper environmental review, ordering the federal Bureau of Reclamation to complete a more thorough evaluation. The US Department of Justice, which is representing the bureau in the legal proceeding, declined to comment on whether the bureau would be appealing the decision.

Meanwhile, Greenstone – which appears to be the first water brokerage firm to sell rights to the Colorado River – could help chart the course of how the resource can be bought and sold in the west.

The farm that was really an investment firm

Greenstone first arrived in Cibola a decade ago – though few here knew anything of the company at the time. Through a subsidiary called GSC Farm LLC, the company purchased 485 acres of land in the Cibola valley in 2013 and 2014, for about $9.8m. Hardly anyone in town took notice.

“Why would we?” said Holly Irwin, a supervisor for La Paz county, which encompasses Cibola.

Initially, Greenstone leased that land back to farmers, who planted fields of alfalfa and rows of puffball cotton.

Then, in 2018, the company sold the water tied to that farmland to Queen Creek, a fast-growing sprawl of gated communities on the outskirts of Arizona’s capital. The city’s government agreed to pay the company $24m for the annual entitlement to 2,033 acre-feet of Colorado River water.

In July of last year, amid continuing legal challenges and national scrutiny, that water was finally diverted. The alfalfa and cotton fields were fallowed – reduced to dry brush and cracked earth.

Many in town were blindsided. “We were all just like: what the heck?” Irwin recalled.

GSC Farm, she realized, wasn’t really a farm at all – it was part of a water investment firm that had brokered water transfer deals all across the south-west.

GSC Farm is one of at least 25 subsidiaries and affiliates of Greenstone, registered in Arizona and other states. Business registration records, deeds, loan documents and tax records show that these companies share the same executives. To local residents, including elected officials such as Irwin, it was initially unclear that the business – which had been acquiring thousands of acres of farmland not only in Cibola but across Arizona – went by so many names.

Greenstone’s executives and lawyers did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the company’s corporate structure, its business model, and how it initiated the Queen Creek deal.

Public records revealed that Greenstone’s financial backers include the global investment firm MassMutual and its subsidiary Barings, as well as public pension funds. At least one of its acquisitions appears to be financed by Rabo AgriFinance, a subsidiary of the Dutch multinational banking and financial services company Rabobank.

On its website, Greenstone describes itself as “a water company” and as “a developer and owner of reliable, sustainable water supplies”. Its CEO, Mike Schlehuber, previously worked for Vidler Water Company – another firm that essentially brokers water supply – as well as Summit Global Management, a company that invests in water suppliers and water rights. Greenstone’s managing director and vice-president, Mike Malano – a former realtor based in Phoenix who remains “active in the Arizona development community”, per his company bio – got himself elected to the board of the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district, a quasi-governmental organization that oversees the distribution of water for agriculture in the region.

Irwin was horrified. She felt that a company with ties to big banks and real estate developers, posing as a farm, had infiltrated her small town and sold off its most precious resource.

The deal won’t have an immediate impact on Cibola’s residents. It doesn’t affect the municipal water supply. But she worries that the transfer will be the first of many. And if more and more farms are fallowed to feed water to cities, what will become of rural towns along the river?

“It’ll be like Owens Valley,” she said, referring to the water grab that inspired the movie Chinatown. In the early 20th century, agents working for the city of Los Angeles, posing as farmers or ranchers, bought up land in the valley and diverted its water to sustain their metropolis, leaving behind a dustbowl.

By allowing the Greenstone deal to go through, “I’m afraid we’ve opened Pandora’s box,” she said.

The Colorado River, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains into Mexico, has declined by about 20% since the turn of the century, amid the most severe drought the west has seen in 1,200 years. In a painfully negotiated deal, Arizona, Nevada and California agreed to reduce the amount of water they draw from the river by 13% through 2026. Experts warned that even deeper cuts would be necessary in the coming decade, but states are currently deadlocked over a longer-term conservation plan.

“With ongoing shortages on the river, driven by climate change, Colorado River water is going to become very valuable,” said Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University. “Anyone who understands this dynamic thinks, ‘Well, if I could buy Colorado River water rights, that’s more valuable than owning oil in this country at this stage.’”

Though the price Queen Creek paid for the water was remarkable – amounting to more than $11,500 per acre-foot – lawyers and water experts in Arizona told the Guardian it would probably sell for even more today.

The process of selling and transferring the water, however, can be bureaucratic and complicated. In most cases, a company like Greenstone would have to first convince fellow landowners in their local irrigation district to allow the sale, and then secure approvals from the state department of water resources and the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages water in the west.

What Irwin and many of Cibola’s residents didn’t realize was that in their sleepy, riverside town, a select group of farmers and landowners had been working for years to facilitate such deals.

‘His dream was to sell this water’

Irrigation districts, as the name suggests, are designed to distribute water for irrigation across the US west. These districts were formed in the 19th and 20th centuries as cooperatives, allowing farmers to pool resources to develop water infrastructure. In the Colorado River basin, the districts contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to deliver water flowing through federal infrastructure to farms and ranches.

Farmers tend to be possessive of their precious water, explained Susanna Eden of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. Most irrigation districts are set up to keep water for farming – and to keep it within their jurisdictions.

But in the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district (CVIDD), landowners seem to have anticipated the market potential of their water.

“It has been said, and I think it has been demonstrated, that the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district was set up by people who were investing in water, rather than pure agriculturalists,” said Eden.

In 1992, long before Greenstone arrived on the scene, CVIDD amended its contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to explicitly contemplate “water exchange, water lease, water transfer” or a change in the “type or place of use” of its water allotment.

The CVIDD board president, Michael Mullion, a farmer in Cibola who had been leasing land from GSC Farm in addition to tending his own land, vouched for the Greenstone’s water transfer at a 2019 hearing with the state’s department of water resources. In his testimony, Mullion talked about how his grandfather had come to the Cibola valley in 1949. “He brushed, cleared, levelled and built the canals for this particular ground,” he said. “But his dream was to actually sell this water.”

The district’s governing philosophy already aligned with Greenstone’s, but the company’s 500-acre purchase here allowed it to more directly influence the district’s policies. Irrigation district boards make key decisions about water in the district – and buying more land can buy more influence on the board. Landowners in the district are entitled to two votes for every acre they hold in board elections.

The district’s board of directors now includes the heads of prominent farming families in the area, including Mullion and his father, Bob, as well as Greenstone’s vice-president, Malano.

Over the years, CVIDD helped landowners, including Greenstone, gain more agency and direct control over their water rights. In most irrigation districts, the district contracts with the Bureau of Reclamation for the right to a lump sum of water, which it distributes to landowners and farmers.

However, a review of CVIDD’s contracts with the bureau revealed that between 2006 and 2014, the district began removing itself as the middleman – giving a few large landowners even more agency over how they use their water. Whereas in other irrigation districts, members would have to vote to approve a water transfer like the Greenstone deal, in the Cibola valley, some landowners can propose transfers as they please, subject to federal approval.

Amid growing public scrutiny of the Cibola-Queen Creek transfer, the CVIDD board in 2019 unanimously approved a resolution disputing the idea that water rights are reserved for local use, and supporting landowners’ right to change “the place of use and purpose of use” of their water.

“I believe they’ve been setting the stage for the Queen Creek transfer,” said Jamie Kelley, an attorney based in Bullhead City. “This was their long-term plan.”

Mullion and lawyers representing CVIDD did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about its founding principles. They also did not address critiques that their policies were set up to benefit landowners seeking to sell water rights.

Even now, after years of public debate and litigation, local residents remain baffled by the idea that water could be sold and siphoned away from them, for ever.

Down a dusty, two-lane road, just past the unassuming cream-colored building where the Cibola valley irrigation district is headquartered, a group gathered for an informal meeting with Holly Irwin last summer to discuss their grievances.

“Why is somebody coming from so far away to take water from here?” said Carol Stewart, who runs Karlz Country Store – the only shop in town.

She hosted a handful of friends and neighbors, mostly retirees and recreators who had settled here decades ago. Everyone huddled into Stewart’s wood-paneled mobile home, a respite from the searing heat, and shouted their questions over the buzz of the AC. What did the transfer mean? Would they have enough water to supply homes here?

“It’s all about the mighty dollar,” Irwin said. “It’s all about money, and how much they can come in and take advantage.”

This deal wouldn’t affect the town’s residential water supplies, Irwin explained. But it meant that more and more farmers might choose to sell out – the water that once irrigated Cibola’s fields could be diverted away. And as the Colorado River shrank, corporations were growing increasingly thirsty for rural supplies.

“Don’t we have water rights?” asked John Rosenfeld, who has lived in Cibola for 24 years. “I have a right to that water, because I’m paying for it.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, Irwin responded. Most of Cibola’s residents get their water from a municipal supply or from private wells. But some properties here come with water rights attached, sometimes dating back to before Arizona was a US state. In the 1800s and the decades following, miners and farmers could snatch water rights up and down the Colorado River simply by laying claim to the water and putting it to use for livestock or irrigating land. It didn’t matter to these settlers that some of that water and land was taken from Indigenous tribes that were here before them.

Those water rights were then passed down from generation to generation. They were formalized in agreements and interstate contracts that left some farming regions and tribes with the highest-priority water rights, while other rural and metropolitan areas received lower-priority rights. Such contracts assign water rights a “priority level” of one through six – priorities one through four represent rights for permanent water service, whereas priorities five and six represent the temporary rights to surplus supplies. The water rights Greenstone purchased in Cibola and sold to Queen Creek are fourth priority – permanently secured and prized.

Notably missing from the group at Karlz Country Store were farmers. The Guardian tried to contact a number of farmers in the region, but other than Mullion, none were available for an interview. Not all agriculturalists are interested in selling their water – but the option may be increasingly appealing as the climate crisis and water shortages disrupt their ability to farm effectively. “It’s hard to know, but demands create pressure,” said Wade Noble, an attorney representing farmers with the Wellton-Mohawk irrigation and drainage district, north of Cibola. “The drought on the river has created very high pressure.”

Greenstone isn’t the only company coveting such water rights. Across the US west, private investors have been scouring rural communities in search of high-priority water rights. In Arizona, Greenstone and firms like it have acquired thousands of acres of irrigable land and their corresponding water rights.

In the Cibola valley, for example, Western Water LLC, another company that specializes in “the sale and transfer of water rights”, owns about 100 acres of land, along with its entitlement to a modest 620 acre-feet of water, public records from the Bureau of Reclamation and La Paz county showed.

Before the Bureau of Reclamation approved Greenstone’s water transfer to Queen Creek, an investigation by the Arizona Republic found that Greenstone and its competitors had acquired thousands of acres of irrigable land across Arizona, including in La Paz, Pinal, Maricopa, Mohave and Yuma counties. The newspaper’s reports were cited by local officials who argued that Greenstone’s water transfer to Queen Creek would be a harbinger of many more such deals, as water becomes increasingly scarce across the west.

A Guardian review of deeds and other public records found that in Yuma county, companies associated with Greenstone hold about 5,300 acres of farmland, much of it within the Wellton-Mohawk irrigation and drainage district. Taxes on those lands were paid by Sunstone Farms LLC, a Greenstone subsidiary that leases agricultural properties.

There, unlike in CVIDD, individual landowners cannot initiate water transfer agreements on their own. But because votes within Wellton-Mohawk are also weighted based on how much land someone owns, larger landowners could seek more influence on its board. County records indicate that a Greenstone-affiliated LLC is one of the largest landowners in the district.

Meanwhile to the north, in Mohave county, Greenstone’s competitor Water Asset Management holds more than 2,400 acres, and access to nearly 16,000 acre-feet of water, per public records from the county.

In 2022, La Paz along with Mohave and Yuma counties filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Reclamation, challenging its claim that the deal would cause “no significant” environmental impact.

“We are arguing in our lawsuit that Reclamation did not analyze the precedent that this transfer set,” said John Lemaster, an attorney representing Mohave county. “The entire purpose of Greenstone is to develop and sell water resources. We know future transfers are likely.”

This year, a federal judge in Arizona sided with them, ruling that the Bureau of Reclamation’s environmental evaluation was “arbitrary and capricious” and ordering the agency to prepare a more thorough assessment. While it’s unclear how the agency will proceed, given that water is already flowing to Queen Creek, the outcome could define how future deals are made and who can lay claim to the Colorado River’s water.

Greenstone, meanwhile, has tried to play down the significance of the transfer.

At a March 2022 committee hearing to discuss a bill introduced by Cobb, the former state representative who tried to limit water transfers, Malano balked at descriptions of his company as a hedge fund, describing Greenstone as “one of the largest farming operations in the state of Arizona”.

Indeed, Greenstone and its competitors, such as Water Asset Management, often lease their land to farmers. But Greenstone’s ultimate goal, per its website, “is to advance water transactions”. And it has been busy doing so. In 2017, it helped secure the right to Rio Grande water for a Facebook data center in Los Lunas, New Mexico. While the Queen Creek deal was the company’s first sale off the Colorado River, it has also brokered a number of deals to supply groundwater to developing communities across Arizona.

In September, the state’s Democratic attorney general filed an amicus brief in support of the counties challenging the transfer. “Future transfers will be likely, if not inevitable,” Kris Mayes wrote, “given the need for water across Arizona.”

A building boom strains a dwindling resource

Queen Creek is growing fast.

Wide, tree-lined boulevards vine off into neat, master-planned communities named Harvest and Encanterra, featuring resort pools, lush golf courses and ornamental lakes. Beyond the sand-hued estates, which blend into the Sonoran landscapes, there is construction. Cranes clear ground, crews build wood frames through suburban cul-de-sacs in various states of completion.

Queen Creek was the seventh-fastest growing city in the US, according to a Census Bureau report released last year. It, like many Arizona suburbs, has struggled to balance a development boom with a shrinking water supply.

Last year, the state moved to limit new housing construction in the suburbs of Phoenix – one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country – to avoid emptying the region’s underground aquifers. Projecting a 4.86m acre-foot shortfall in groundwater supplies over the next century, the state announced that all future housing developments in the desert would have to find some other source of water, by purchasing or importing their supply.

Ambitious cities and developers have been left scrambling.

The suburb of Buckeye, west of Phoenix, has considered building a desalination plant in the Mexican town of Puerto Peñasco and piping the treated water several hundred miles north to Arizona.

Queen Creek’s water manager, Paul Gardner, said the town had been working for years to secure water for its future. In addition to piping water from the Colorado River, the city has also sought to import groundwater from the Harquahala valley, to the east of Cibola. It recently signed a $30m deal with Harquahala Valley Landowners LLC, a company that represents farmers and investors with water rights, to siphon off 5,000 acre-feet of ground water a year to feed its maze of gated communities and sprawling subdivisions.

Meanwhile, in Cibola, Holly Irwin dreams of development too – though of a different sort.

On the east bank of the Colorado, she recently oversaw the cleanup and restoration of a stretch of open space for residents and visitors. “Now we have trash cans, we have picnic tables,” Irwin said. “My goal is we’ll have campsites that stretch all the way down. And more electrical hookups for RVs.”

In the summertime, she hopes, the river will be filled with boats and its shore with picnickers and campers. “We could attract more people, from all over.”

Stewart, the shop owner, first came here as a “weekender” from San Diego, California. She was drawn to the region’s rugged beauty and rural familiarity. “This was a place to roam, to be with family.”

In the decade since she and her family moved here, she has also seen the Colorado shrink, and its lush banks fade. “There’s been years when you could basically walk across the river,” she said. “That is what has scared a lot of people. We need the water here.”

It’s taken a while to get here but Anthony Albanese is on the verge of promising what some economists and most clean energy advocates have been urging Australian governments to do for years. Or at least a version of it.

The prime minister’s promised “Future Made in Australia” act is clumsily named, and the announcement last week had few details, but the idea – that the government will need to use its weight to help develop green industries if the country is to make a rapid transition from fossil fuels to a clean economy – has been a long time coming.

Some of the criticism that followed has made headlines but been pretty unremarkable. It’s true that, if badly developed, an interventionist industry policy could become a money pit and create subsidy-dependent businesses. The government should absolutely aim not to do that. It underlines the importance of the decisions being made in Canberra before next month’s budget.

It’s also true that leaders will need to be bold, and an overly cautious approach is unlikely to do what’s needed. The expert consensus is that there is an opportunity in this moment – as the climate crisis worsens, and as countries comparable to Australia introduce strategies to attract trillions in clean investment – to spur the new industries needed to gain a foothold in new industries and help create green jobs.

It won’t last for ever at this scale. And taking it slow won’t avoid attacks on the government from people stuck on the idea that little of substance needs to change as the climate crisis rewrites the global economy. They’re going to happen anyway.

Other countries – in Europe, and Japan, Korea and Canada – are already chasing some of the trillions in global clean investment up for grabs in the decades ahead. They have mostly been reacting to what could be US$1tn in support for clean industries contained in that country’s paradigm-shifting Inflation Reduction Act.

But they are also responding to the slower creep of China’s massive green investment that has, for example, given it near complete dominance of the global solar supply chain that everyone relies on. It explains why several of the countries stuck the word “security” in the name of their green industry strategies.

The challenge for a resource-rich, medium-sized economy such as Australia is to identify industries in which it has a competitive advantage, and weigh how best to minimise the risks to taxpayers. It will be a while before it’s clear the extent to which the areas the government has backed to date – $2bn to kickstart a proposed green hydrogen industry, $1bn for solar panel supply chain manufacturing, and $4bn for mining and processing of critical minerals – fit into the category.

Smart minds have suggested that a sensible approach would be to mostly stop exporting raw materials and instead back onshore production and refinement of products such as ammonia, iron, steel, aluminium and a variety of critical minerals. Substantially more support will be needed, probably through tax breaks and direct investments as well as cheap loans and guarantees.

Consideration of how best to do this is running parallel with the equally important issue of how to ensure that people in the most fossil fuel-reliant parts of Australia are not trampled into the dust in a stampede for a clean future. We have known for years that parts of the country are likely to face a disproportionately hard future as dirty industries are inevitably phased down, and eventually out. Though often discussed, this issue has largely been ignored in national policy.

It hasn’t had the same attention as the promised shift to green industry policy, but there is evidence this is changing. Last month, as the government introduced legislation to create a Net Zero Economy Authority to help manage the transition to a clean economy, it quietly posted an impact analysis that is shaping its thinking.

The report assesses what will happen as at least 10 of the country’s remaining 19 coal-fired power plants shut by 2035. It estimates more than 3,000 coal power workers could lose their jobs, with spillover losses for about 900 contractors.

Past experience suggests as many as a third of the people who work at coal plants could still be unemployed a year after the generator has closed if left unsupported, and that their drop in earning capacity tends to be much greater than in other closing industries. The impact on financial hardship and health can ripple through a community and become a “self-reinforcing cycle” as people find it increasingly difficult to find work and lose skills and motivation.

These coal jobs are concentrated in just six regions across the country, notably Gladstone in central Queensland, the Hunter and Latrobe valleys, and Collie in Western Australia. Some of these areas are likely to benefit from new clean industries, which will mostly be regional, but it obviously won’t be a one-for-one match.

The report lists three ways the government could respond: do nothing, create a pooled redeployment policy for affected workers that the owners coal plants bosses can opt in to, or introduce laws that would allow it to force the owners of coal plants and their suppliers to take part in the redeployment arrangements and support their employees to find new jobs.

The latter two options would come at a public cost – almost $130m for the legislated third option – but the report argues the benefits that flowed from creating a pool of skilled workers for new employers, improving the social, health and welfare outcomes for workers and their families, and maintaining social cohesion and local identity would be significantly greater.

It also found more than 2.5 times as many workers were likely to be transferred into new jobs under the option that gave the government the power to force companies to act than if it made it a voluntary scheme. The “do nothing” option, in which the future of the workers would be left to the market, was not even assessed.

The implicit message is that the people affected by the historic transition under way need to be brought along for the ride, and given the help they need to get through it. As with the promised green industry policy, it’s taken a while to get here. But it’s the right place to start.

Australians are choosing hybrid over electric vehicles, but sales of both continue to climb while internal combustion engines record a decline.

Hybrids outsold EVs in three consecutive quarters with 95,129 sales – overtaking 69,593 EVs sold, according to the Australian Automobile Association’s quarterly EV Index released on Tuesday night.

The data also reinforced a recent trend of declining sales of conventional cars, which have fallen by 8.03% in the fourth quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024. Their market share also dropped to 78.18%, sinking below 80% for the first time.

EVs rose to 8.70% market share in this time, while hybrids jumped to 11.95% – up from 6.26% in the first quarter of 2023.

“People are wanting to go into that lower cost, lower emissions motoring, but they just don’t think they are ready for the full EV experience,” Australian Automotive Dealer Association boss James Voortman said.

Premium prices amid a cost of living crisis, as well as a lack of recharging infrastructure, are the main concerns stopping consumers from making the transition to EVs, he said.

Three in five consumers are “less open to paying more money for an electric vehicle due to the current cost of living pressures,” Voortman said, pointing to AADA survey results released in February.

“During this time where everything is costing more” it can be more difficult for consumers to look beyond an EV’s upfront price premium and towards fuel savings, he said.

Charging infrastructure is “no doubt” another concern.

“There is a growing acceptance that you can do a lot of your charging at home, but not everyone has access to home charging,” Voortman said.

“I think as the infrastructure rolls out, we will see more and more people willing to take up an electric vehicle.”

The specific types of vehicles available can also pose as a barrier for consumers in need of a larger vehicle, like a ute, van or SUV are an affordable price point.

“It is going to take time for those vehicles to arrive,” Voortman said.

In the meantime, “hybrid technology [is] a stepping stone,” Voortman said.

While “there is no doubt that driving a hybrid is a lot more friendly for the environment than a pure petrol or diesel vehicle”, it is also “a lot more affordable for those customers”.

“There are significant benefits for for both customers but also for the environment,” Voortman said.

“There is no doubt the future is fully electric and zero emissions motoring, but there is going to be a bit of a journey to get there.”

“Hybrids are a good stepping stone to that future.”

Greece has become the first country in Europe to announce a ban on bottom trawling in all of its national marine parks and protected areas.

The country said will spend €780m (£666m) to protect its “diverse and unique marine ecosystems”.

The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, told delegates at the Our Ocean conference in Athens on Tuesday: “We’ve established two additional marine national parks, one in the Ionian and one in the Aegean, increasing the size of our marine protected areas by 80% and covering one third of our marine territorial waters.

“We will ban bottom trawling in our national parks by 2026 and in all marine protected areas by 2030.”

He said he would also establish a state-of-the-art surveillance system, including drones, to enforce the ban.

The proposed Ionian marine national park will cover almost 12% of Greek territorial waters, safeguarding sea mammals like sperm whales, striped dolphins and the vulnerable Mediterranean monk seal and the South Aegean MPA, which covers 6.61% of Greek territorial waters.

However, the Athens government’s decision to go ahead with two new marine parks in the Aegean and Ionian has stirred up tensions with its historical rival Turkey. Ankara’s foreign ministry warned Greece last week that the proposal in the Aegean lay in a disputed area and that the initiative was “politically motivated”.

Conservationists welcomed the announcement and said they hoped the move would create a “domino effect” for other EU countries to do the same.

Nicholas Fournier, the campaign director for marine protection at the international conservation group Oceana, said: “Everyone was expecting France or Germany or Spain to step up. The fact that Greece is championing this ban on bottom trawling is surprising but very welcome.

“We hope this creates a domino effect on other European countries to do the same. The pressure is on France, as it hosts the UN oceans conference next year.”

The news came as France was accused of hypocrisy by conservationists over a post-Brexit dispute with the UK over fishing rights. The country launched an official protest after the UK moved to ban bottom trawling from parts of its territorial waters to protect vulnerable marine habitats.

Charles Clover, the co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation, a UK-based conservation organisation, said: “The grownups of Europe really do need to sort out the extraordinary chaos between its member states over marine protection. France claims to have already protected 30% of its waters – while their own conservationists tell us less than 0.1% of its waters are effectively protected from trawling.

“On top of that, France wants to prevent Britain banning trawling in marine protected areas in the UK’s own waters – which is utter hypocrisy, contrary to habitats laws that apply to both of us and unacceptable to the UK. Today we have Greece leading Europe by announcing that it will actually protect all of its MPAs from trawling by 2030, which amounts to a huge 32% of its waters. Has the EU no common standards?”

Bottom trawling by industrial vessels is a hugely damaging fishing technique that drags heavy nets across the seabed, destroying habitats and releasing carbon into the sea and the atmosphere.

Oceana – along with other NGOs, the Marine Conservation Society and Seas at Risk – has urged the EU to take tougher action against members that still allow bottom trawling in their marine protected areas. A report in March showed that the destructive practice is still happening in 90% of all offshore MPAs in the EU.

At the moment, just 7-8% of the ocean is protected, and only 3% falls under the “highly protected” category.

Some people spend a long time deciding what they want to do in life. Hazel McBride feels lucky that she’s always known. As a child in Scotland, she watched a VHS tape of Free Willy on repeat. That was the first time she felt a connection with killer whales. The second time was at age eight, on a trip to SeaWorld Orlando in 2000. Shamu was the animal world’s greatest celebrity, and in the US, SeaWorld ads were ubiquitous. Kids wanted to see the killer whales, and after they saw them, they told their parents they wanted to become killer whale trainers. McBride actually did it.

It wasn’t easy. Scotland didn’t have a SeaWorld, or warm water, or anywhere, really, where McBride could get experience with marine mammals. She had horses she cared for, and she was on the national swim team – a modest start. She sent out volunteer applications to local zoos and worked with California sea lions at a safari park. She reached out to trainers online and one told her a psychology degree would help, so she got one.

When it was time for her to get “dolphin experience” – a rung up the career ladder (and food chain) toward orcas – she interned abroad in the Bahamas and Florida, prepping buckets of dolphin food and giving educational briefings. She graduated from the University of Glasgow and started applying for jobs.

But killer whale gigs are competitive; McBride’s first full-time gig was still with dolphins, in the Dominican Republic. Then, in 2015, a space opened up on the orca team at Loro Parque in Spain. After a lifetime preparing, she had the career she’d always dreamed of. She was, finally, in charge of a killer whale.

There was only one problem: Blackfish had premiered.

Blackfish, a 2013 documentary, argues that beneath the feel-good facade of orca shows are sick and miserable whales, and trainers in lethal danger. The film centers the 2010 death of the SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau to make a powerful case against orca captivity.

Orca researchers interviewed in the film say that orcas captured in the wild at a young age become violent, particularly when forced to perform and breed by their captors. Blackfish argues that Brancheau’s killing by Tilikum, a particularly aggressive orca, is a result of SeaWorld’s cruelty toward the social, hyper-intelligent species. Blackfish then links her death to other fatal orca incidents, including the 2009 death of the trainer Alexis Martínez at Loro Parque, McBride’s employer.

The film – a masterclass in emotional exposé that reoriented the consciences of marine park goers in favor of the animals’ rights – was wildly popular. It had 21 million viewers the month it premiered on CNN, after its theatrical run. SeaWorld stock plummeted, and the park began offering tickets at as deep a discount as 46%. Proposed bans on whale captivity and the use of orcas for entertainment rippled through state legislatures.

Online, the hashtag #EmptytheTanks proliferated, with fans of the film staging campaigns to pressure corporate sponsors into dropping their SeaWorld partnerships, or singers to cancel their shows at the parks. By 2015, SeaWorld had reported an 84% drop in profit compared with 2014 as attendance shrank.

The impact on the industry went far beyond its best-known park brand. McBride woke up one morning in Spain and found out that orca breeding, one of the most controversial aspects of orca captivity, was subject to a ban at her own place of work. She was furious. The International Marine Animal Trainers’ Association (Imata), the organization that develops criteria for marine animal training, was publicly silent but privately furious, too.

In a recording of an Imata panel posted to YouTube in 2014, an attendee asked the then chair of the public relations and promotion committee, Michael Hunt, what he thought of the movie. He, and everyone else who spoke on the panel, seemed disgusted by it.

“What movie did we pay for … Man of Steel?” Hunt said, describing his own filmgoing experience. “And we snuck into Blackfish so that way they didn’t get our money.”

The crowd, including trainers who had dedicated their lives to working with captive marine mammals, erupted into applause and laughter. And again and again as the panel’s plan emerged: “This is not about the United States, this is about the whole world. We need some material … to show in other countries in other languages so everybody can see the other side, the real and the true side of this story.” Applause. “Be truthful when you’re on TV… Don’t get caught in a lie. And tell them you want to do live interviews. Live interviews they can’t edit, and they can’t make you look stupid.” More applause.

They’d found their saving grace: though the trainers played a major role in killer whales’ captivity, Blackfish did not paint them as the bad guys. “That gives us a little bit of an advantage as we craft our message,” Hunt could be heard saying. “As we move forward, we need to be out there proactively telling our story.”

The marine mammal training industry has been in the midst of an identity crisis ever since.

I never sought McBride out. She appeared organically, on my Instagram feed, years later, doing just what Hunt had urged. It was 2021, and I saw a photo of her pressing her cheek to a killer whale’s mouth. She had also self-published a memoir and defense of killer whale training, I Still Believe, and soon started hosting a podcast, on which she interviewed former killer whale trainers, while keeping up a YouTube channel, Tiktok account, and blog.

“The hardest thing about speaking openly and publically [sic] about killer whales? The constant repetition and nitpicking. My words are my own. If they don’t serve you? Leave. It’s that simple,” she’d written in the post that crossed my feed. “My first priority has always been standing up for trainers and giving us a voice.”

After two years at Loro Parque, McBride had moved on to a senior killer whale training role at Marineland in southern France, a seemingly blissful time. In a recording of her Marineland show, she beams as two orcas cry out their songs for her, on cue. Later in the show, she blows an orca a kiss, and it responds with a little opening of its mouth back. She described Wikie, an orca there, as her “soul animal”.

“She’s the most interesting being I’ve ever met in my entire life,” she later told me.

But things have changed in the decade since Blackfish. Many trainers feel the added public attention around the killer whale captivity debate has not only destroyed any chances of holding on to their dream jobs, but also made them pariahs. McBride told me that an older trainer she knew had said his job used to function as a pickup line at bars. After Blackfish, it was more likely to get a drink thrown in his face than get him laid. Another former trainer told me she struggled with burnout amid all the public scrutiny; she now works as a deckhand on a boat.

As groups like Imata walk the line between angry trainers and a marine park-going public that is now aware of the captive orca’s plight, some American and European trainers are traveling further afield for work – often to Asia. Meanwhile, captive orcas remain, well, captive – and in some countries, their numbers might be increasing.

“I feel fortunate to be one of the endangered species myself,” Grey Stafford told me. “A killer whale trainer.”

Stafford, Imata’s president and board director for several years in the 2010s, was also a trainer in the 90s. He decided to become one in 1989, when he and his fiancée went to SeaWorld Ohio and witnessed three apex predators – a human, a bottlenose dolphin and a killer whale – swim alongside each other. That’s when he knew.

The 90s were “the glory days” for trainers, Stafford says. Sure, there were anti-captivity folks back then, but “you could literally just have one spokesperson comment, respond to questions or criticism by detractors, and then it would go away,” he said. “Those days are long gone.”

By 2024, Stafford was still speaking out on behalf of animal trainers as a podcaster. He recently wrapped an episode about SeaWorld Ohio and “what we lost when she closed her doors”. I asked him what we had lost.

“We have a generation or two now that, unlike you, have not seen human beings in the water with killer whales,” he said. “And that is something precious that has been lost.”

For perspective, Deborah Giles, a killer whale researcher at the University of Washington, says that orca captivity “would be like putting us [humans] in a bathroom, or something that small”.

“These are not well adapted animals for the environment that we’re forcing them into,” she said.

Though marine scientists – including Giles – stand by the facts in Blackfish, certain discrepancies on the production’s part laid the groundwork for SeaWorld’s rebuttal. SeaWorld noted that video clips occasionally showed a different orca than the one being discussed in the narration, and that Blackfish relied on sources who’d formerly, not concurrently, worked at the park. It said that Blackfish didn’t mention how SeaWorld “rescues, rehabilitates and returns to the wild hundreds of wild animals every year” and “commits millions of dollars annually to conservation and scientific research”. Blackfish was “inaccurate and misleading”, the park claimed.

None of this denies that Tilikum killed three people, or that killer whales are better suited to life in the wild. “Their social bonds, which are broken when they’re taken from their family and put into captivity, is part of the very essence of the species, and yet we break that when we take them away,” Giles said.

Nevertheless, McBride and many of her fans want to return to marine parks’ pre-Blackfish heyday. Parades of heart emojis cascade through the comments below each orca pic McBride posts, and fans write in to share their happy memories of killer whale shows. McBride believes Blackfish was overly sensational, and that the people who care for orcas daily are the ones most equipped to determine what’s best for them. Likewise, many of her followers disparage the claims made in Blackfish. “Blackfish 👏 is 👏 NOT 👏 a 👏 resource 👏,” said one commenter.

McBride is far from the only trainer advocating for a return to the pre-Blackfish status quo on social media. Another trainer-run account, @Truth4Toki, lobbied against Tokitae’s planned release from the Miami Seaquarium to her native waters in the Salish Sea. Like McBride’s page, Truth4Toki argued that trainers knew better than anti-captivity activists what was best for the animal. Its bio boasts that the group has over 300 collective years of experience working with Tokitae. (Tokitae died in a Miami Seaquarium tank in August after more than 50 years in captivity.)

Part of Stafford’s argument for killer whale captivity is that we wouldn’t know as much about the species if we’d never captured them.

“In terms of the specific skills of working with a killer whale, those skills are going away,” he said. “What happens when we lose that human capital, the people who know how to disentangle whales off the coast of California? The people who understand maternal behavior? That is going to die out.”

I asked Giles what she thought about that. She offered that when captive facilities started, “We didn’t know better. We just frankly didn’t know how intelligent these whales were.” Now we do.

Reflecting on her first trip to SeaWorld, McBride wrote in her memoir: “Looking back it almost seems as if I started out in my career at exactly the wrong time.”

Stafford, however, doesn’t believe the dream of training in a pre-Blackfish world is dead. “Here’s the truly ironic thing,” he said. “The best killer whale training that’s happening right now is in east Asia.”

Moving to China was never Steve Hearn’s plan. But when a Chinese property developer approached the marine mammal trainer in 2018 about a job opportunity on the island province of Hainan, he was open minded. Hearn, a 30-year industry veteran, was working at a dolphinarium in the Netherlands, where he had “always worked under a certain amount of activist pressure”. But, he said, “the last 10, 15 years has been a lot worse.”

R&F Properties’ vision for Hainan Ocean Paradise impressed Hearn; he visited the site as it was under construction and marveled at the size of the holes in the ground. He was offered a position overseeing more than 100 mostly Chinese trainers and began teaching them how to work with marine animals according to Imata standards. The park was also the mainland’s first to publicly eschew the controversial practice of wild capture, displaying only animals that had been rescued, says Hearn (though animals that had been previously wild-captured by other parties could still count as rescues). It did not house orcas.

That level of regard for the animals’ provenance and care is rare among the Chinese facilities that do house the animals, according to Taison Chang, chairman of the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society.

Pre-Covid, Chang made a trip to visit some facilities on the mainland, including Chimelong, the self-proclaimed “Orlando of China”. The $2bn Chimelong Ocean Kingdom, which opened the year after Blackfish premiered, housed nine wild-caught orcas, and in 2017, it celebrated becoming China’s first orca breeding facility. The China Cetacean Alliance (CCA) estimated that, as of 2019, there were 80 ocean parks in China, the majority of which held whales or dolphins in captivity, and another 27 were under construction.

“I was very convinced that the condition of the facilities was poor,” Chang said of the parks he visited. Tanks were sometimes small and poorly maintained, the animals living too densely together. In some instances, species from wildly different habitats shared the same tank.

Chang said the number of marine animal facilities in China would hit 100 soon. China, however, is new to marine park development. And none of this development would have been possible without the help of trainers and marine park experts from the west.

“There has been a trend that facilities, especially the big ones like Chimelong and Haichang [Ocean Park, in Shanghai], are hiring trainers from the west. They are often portrayed as the ‘star’ trainers,” Chang said. This echoed Hearn’s experience at events for Hainan Ocean Paradise: “I had to be there because it was a foreign face showing that we’re investing correctly in all of our aspects of our park.”

That might be due to China’s poor reputation for marine animal welfare. As of 2019, CCA was aware of at least 15 orcas held in captivity in China (the US has 18, all of them at SeaWorld parks), and 14 Chinese parks claimed to have bred marine mammals in captivity. Of the 37 whale or dolphin births CCA was aware of, at least seven of the calves died. The last calf to be born under SeaWorld’s breeding program died in 2017, a year after SeaWorld announced plans to end captive orca breeding.

As SeaWorld struggled to rebrand itself post-Blackfish, China’s Zhonghong Group acquired a 21% stake in SeaWorld Entertainment Inc, making it the largest shareholder, with SeaWorld agreeing to advise the group on future parks abroad. (It terminated the agreement two years later when Zhonghong defaulted on a loan.)

Hearn, though not affiliated with SeaWorld, confirmed the demand in China for western marine park expertise: When I spoke to him in February, he was planning on traveling to Shanghai to consult on three additional marine parks.

When I asked Chang if he saw killer whale captivity continuing to grow in China, he said: “Definitely.”

Killer whales have not always been an entertainment commodity. A hundred years ago, they were more likely to be cast as monsters than have their likenesses made into stuffed animals.

The change, the historian Jason Colby argues in his book Orca, came mid-century, when industry in the Pacific north-west shifted from reliance on extractive, labor-intensive jobs to a middle-class leisure economy. Orcas were no longer seen as a daily threat to fishermen. Instead, they were marvels – to the white majority of the region, anyway; members of the Lummi Nation say they have always seen orcas as their relatives. The first wild captures for captivity occurred in this region. Like elephants before them, orcas soon became a “marquee” animal, solidifying a certain park’s status and drawing more spectators.

Paradoxically, Americans’ heightened awareness of killer whales led to greater conservation efforts, which in turn paved the way for today’s anti-captivity movement. (One subspecies of orca, the Southern Resident orca, remains endangered today.)

Colby tells me he’s fascinated by the number of people he’s met whose transformative encounters with orcas in captivity as children, despite being positive, were the launching pad for anti-captivity activism. I tell him about a reverse scenario: that I’d spoken to a killer whale trainer who was first inspired by Free Willy, a movie about releasing a whale into the wild. “That movie doesn’t even work if you don’t have captive orcas,” he pointed out.

I asked everyone I spoke to what drew them to the ocean’s fiercest predator. Stafford called swimming with orcas “a thrill that I will never enjoy again in my life”. Several people pointed out that orcas are black and white, which, if you think about it, is pretty cool. Others talked about having early visions of orcas as if they’d been Inception-ed into their brains.

Giles recalled a vivid dream she’d had as a child, in which she changed places with an orca stuck in a pool. There was no reason for orcas to feature so prevalently in her psyche; she grew up on a worm farm.

A former SeaWorld trainer, Kyle Kittleson, told me: “I was born this way.

“I was born a man. I was born gay. And I was born with a love of marine mammals.”

Like McBride, Kittleson spent years in his landlocked hometown scheming ways to get marine animal experience. When he finally landed the interview at SeaWorld Orlando and traveled to Florida, it had to be rescheduled; it was the day Tilikum killed Dawn Brancheau.

Maybe it’s just that lifelong dreams are hard to shake, but even Brancheau’s death didn’t phase Kittleson. He eventually worked in the same stadium she had, loving the crazy-intense swim test he had to pass to even be considered, the parrots he fed and bonded with, the jacket that said “SeaWorld” on it.

But things were different after Brancheau died. More government regulation creeped into Kittleson’s work, and he disagreed with the new rules. And then came Blackfish – “a piece of propaganda that was meant to evoke feelings rather than logic from the viewer”, he claimed – and public opinion shifted underneath him.

Kittleson eventually quit the profession but continued to defend killer whale training online and self-published a guidebook for aspiring trainers, Wear a Wetsuit at Work. Today, though, he’s one of several trainers I spoke to who has pivoted almost entirely away from the field. Kittleson currently runs the educational YouTube page Baba Blast! for kids. He likes his work, even if it’s not what he spent his childhood dreaming about.

Imata, meanwhile, continues to quietly defend its own existence. Throughout the 2010s, its annual conference featured pro-captivity speakers like the former trainer Mark Simmons, the pro-SeaWorld voice in Blackfish. More recently, Imata leader Hunt joined Stafford on his podcast in honor of the organization’s 50th anniversary, in 2022. (Hunt could not be reached for comment.) This month, Imata’s annual conference featured a behind-the-scenes tour of SeaWorld San Antonio, home to five killer whales.

McBride, too, made a career pivot. In September 2020, she released a YouTube video announcing plans to leave her job at Marineland to be closer to her boyfriend during the pandemic. It was titled The Hardest Decision of My Life.

“If you are an aspiring trainer out there, I want to let you know that your identity outside of the job is also very important,” McBride said, tearfully, into the camera. “At the end of the day, sometimes it is just a job.”

These days, she’s still posting in support of orca captivity. But her new job, social media manager for a non-profit in the Netherlands, really is just a job.

Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.

As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.

Today, tuning into some ecosystems reveals a “deathly silence”, said Prof Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol. “It is that race against time – we’ve only just discovered that they make such sounds, and yet we hear the sound disappearing.”

“The changes are profound. And they are happening everywhere,” said US soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, who has taken more than 5,000 hours of recordings from seven continents over the past 55 years. He estimates that 70% of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.

Prof Bryan Pijanowski from Purdue University in the US has been listening to natural sounds for 40 years and taken recordings from virtually all of the world’s main types of ecosystems.

He said: “The sounds of the past that have been recorded and saved represent the sounds of species that might no longer be here – so that’s all we’ve got. The recordings that many of us have [are] of places that no longer exist, and we don’t even know what those species are. In that sense they are already acoustic fossils.”

Numerous studies are now documenting how natural soundscapes are changing, being disrupted and falling silent. A 2021 study in the journal Nature of 200,000 sites across North America and Europe found “pervasive loss of acoustic diversity and intensity of soundscapes across both continents over the past 25 years, driven by changes in species richness and abundance”. The authors added: “One of the fundamental pathways through which humans engage with nature is in chronic decline with potentially widespread implications for human health and wellbeing.”

The shift in ecosystem sound is happening in the air, the forests, the soil, and even under the water. During the cold war, the US navy used underwater surveillance systems to track Soviet submarines – and found they struggled to do so near coral reefs due to all the sounds reefs produced. It wasn’t until 1990 that civilian scientists could listen to this classified data.

“Whenever we went to a healthy reef it blew our minds – the cacophony of sounds we heard,” said Simpson, who has been monitoring coral reefs using hydrophones for more than 20 years. “A healthy reef was a carnival of sound.”

At the outset of his research, noise pollution from motorboats was his main concern, but 2015 and 2016 brought significant bleaching events, which resulted in 80% mortality of corals. “They cooked the reef,” he said. More than half of the world’s coral reef cover has now been lost since 1950. If global heating reaches 2C, more than 99% of coral reefs are expected to start dying.

The result of these bleaching events is a “deathly silence”, said Simpson. “We swam around those reefs crying into our masks.”

“These sounds and silences speak back to us like in a mirror,” said Hildegard Westerkamp, a Canadian sound ecologist who has been recording soundscapes for half a century, during which time wildlife populations have experienced average declines of almost 70%.

She started working on the World Soundscape Project in 1973 with the intention of documenting disappearing ecosystems. “We proposed to start to listen to the soundscape, to everything, no matter how uncomfortable it may be – how uncomfortable the message.”

She said: “The act of listening itself can be both comforting and highly unsettling. But most importantly it tends to connect us to the reality of what we are facing.”

Sound data is now being used alongside visual data as a way to monitor conservation efforts and ecosystem health. More sophisticated and cheaper recording equipment – as well as increasing concerns about environmental destruction – are driving the boom in ecoacoustic monitoring.

As the sophistication of microphones has increased, scientists are using them to monitor life that would not usually be audible to human ears. Marcus Maeder, an acoustic ecologist and sound artist from Switzerland, has been investigating the noises trees make under stress, pushing a microphone into the bark of a tree to listen to the living tissue. Stress sounds like pulses come from within the cavity, he said.

When he first pushed a microphone into the soil of a mountain meadow he discovered it was also alive with noise, “a completely new kingdom of sounds”.

Intensively managed agricultural land, often doused with pesticides, sounds very different, Maeder said: “The soil becomes quiet.”

For many researchers, disappearing soundscapes are a source of grief as well as of scientific interest. “It’s a sad thing to be doing, but it’s also helping me tell a story about the beauty of nature,” said Pijanowski. “As a scientist I have trouble explaining what biodiversity is, but if I play a recording and say what I’m talking about – these are the voices of this place. We can either work to preserve it or not.

“Sound is the most powerful trigger of emotions for humans. Acoustic memories are very strong too. I’m thinking about it as a scientist, but it’s hard not to be emotional.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features