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.”

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The tale starts 30 years ago, when Bernie Krause made his first audio clip in Sugarloaf Ridge state park, 20 minutes’ drive from his house near San Francisco. He chose a spot near an old bigleaf maple. Many people loved this place: there was a creek and a scattering of picnic benches nearby.

As a soundscape recordist, Krause had travelled around the world listening to the planet. But in 1993 he turned his attention to what was happening on his doorstep. In his first recording, a stream of chortles, peeps and squeaks erupt from the animals that lived in the rich, scrubby habitat. His sensitive microphones captured the sounds of the creek, creatures rustling through undergrowth, and the songs of the spotted towhee, orange-crowned warbler, house wren and mourning dove.

Back then, Krause never thought of this as a form of data-gathering. He began recording ecosystem sounds simply because he found them beautiful and relaxing. Krause has ADHD and found no medication would work: “The only thing that relieved the anxiety was being out there and just listening to the soundscapes,” he says.

Inadvertently, he had begun to gather a rich trove of data. Over the next three decades he would return each April to the spot at the bigleaf maple, set his recorder down and wait to hear what it would reveal.

But in April last year, Krause played back his recording and was greeted with something he had not heard before: total silence. The recorder had run for its usual hour, but picked up no birdsong, no rush of water over stones, no beating wings. “I’ve got an hour of material with nothing, at the high point of spring,” says Krause. “What’s happening here is just a small indication of what’s happening almost everywhere on an even larger scale.”

A rich weave of sound fades

Animals produce a vast array of sounds: to find mates, protect territories, identify offspring or simply by moving about. But traditionally, ecologists have measured environmental health by looking at habitats rather than listening to them. Krause developed the idea that the sound of healthy ecosystems contained not only the calls of individual animals, but a dense, structured weave of sounds that he called the “biophony”.

In 2009, when Krause listened through his archive, he realised a story was emerging: a subtle but noticeable loss in the density and variety of natural sounds.

At the same time, he began observing odd things happening in Sugarloaf Ridge park. Leaves on some tree species were unfurling two weeks earlier than documented in historical records. The change in bloom meant migrating birds following the Pacific Flyway were out of sync with sources of food along their route. Winter rain patterns had changed. Then in 2012, exceptional drought conditions started. California had been getting little rain and record hot temperatures, which pushed the parched land into unprecedented territory.

By 2014, northern California was experiencing its most serious drought in 1,200 years, and the bird song in Krause’s recording becomes muted.

In 2015, the quiet sets in. There is no stream flow or wind in the audio. In 2016, the hush is broken only by the call of a purple finch.

“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” Krause wrote in 2012, in his book The Great Animal Orchestra. “The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.”

Life swept away by fire

Then, in 2017, the Tubbs fire struck, the most destructive wildfire in northern California’s modern history.

Krause happened to be awake at 2.30am on the October morning when the flames reached his home. He and his wife had to run through a wall of fire surrounding the house. “Except for us, not one single item that we had amassed over the arc of our lives survived,” he says. “As we raced toward the car, a fire tornado seethed with a voice of rage.

“That sound haunts us to this day,” he says. “I rarely make it through a night without awakening to frightful sonic nightmares.”

Propelled by gusts of 78mph, the fire incinerated entire neighbourhoods. Krause’s cats, Seaweed and Barnacle, died. He lost 70 years of letters, photographs and field journals, in flames so intense they left the refrigerator an unrecognisable puddle of aluminium and steel. His precious recording archive survived, in copies stored elsewhere.

The Tubbs fire burned 80% of Sugarloaf Ridge park. John Roney, the park manager, managed to evacuate 50-60 campers as the fire roared towards them.

The bigleaf maple survived. It stood up to the fire,” says Breck Parkman, a retired state parks archaeologist. “It lost branches and got partially stunted, but it survived.” But in September 2020, the Glass fire hit: one of nearly 30 wildfires across California that month.

“That pretty much finished off what was left of that tree,” says Parkman. He remembers once taking Clint Eastwood to look at it, as well as some botanists trying to establish if it was the biggest maple in the American west – they never confirmed its status. “It didn’t really matter, though. The birds knew the tree was grand. For them, this was the tree of life,” he says.

He believes the tree should have lived for a few hundred more years and likens it to an elder at family gatherings who brings wonderful food. One day that person disappears. “It’s a type of sadness – it’s hard to describe,” he says.

“It’s a loss, and there’s a longing. I would suspect the birds still miss that tree. I do.”

Many forest ecosystems are reliant on fire to decompose dead wood and old leaves but historically these tended to be smaller fires. They did not typically burn the tree canopy, so insects and other animals could take refuge without getting scorched. The larger fires in recent years are much hotter and threaten endangered species that have restricted ranges.

Desirae Harp, an educator at the state park and member of the local Mishewal Wappo tribe, says the silence that fell after the fires broke her heart.

“Hearing that silence, of all those native plants and animals, is heartbreaking because those are our relatives. I feel like when human beings die we call it genocide. But when we destroy whole ecosystems, we don’t always understand the weight of that.”

A silent message to the world

One of the most significant environmental books of the 20th century is Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Published in 1962, it warned that if people did not stop their destruction of nature, especially through the use of pesticides such as DDT, the number of birds and other wild creatures would continue to decline and silence would begin to fall over the natural world.

In Krause’s recording from April 2023, not only is the birdsong missing, but there is no water in the creek either. “We’re watching this in our own lifetime, which is startling,” he says.

Comparison of 2003 and 2023:

In 2019, Krause argued that the climate crisis could be “changing the Earth’s natural acoustic fabric”. He drew an analogy between the natural world and a concert hall: if the heat and moisture of the concert hall changed, so too would the players’ ability to perform.

“The same is happening for Earth’s orchestra. New atmospheric conditions are detuning natural sounds,” he wrote. “Only major mitigation actions will help preserve Earth’s beat.”

One of the reasons people were first drawn to Sonoma county, where most of the state park lies, was to go fishing, hunting and swim in the creeks. In the 1970s there were many places to swim, says Steven Lee, a research manager at Sonoma Ecology Center. “People don’t swim in the creeks here any more. Why not? Because there’s not enough water.”

The biodiversity associated with the streams has also been lost. Chinook salmon and steelhead trout are unable to reach their spawning grounds if there is no water. “It’s definitely drastic,” says Lee, about Krause’s latest recording. “The pessimist in me would say that we’re probably going to see a lot of these declines continue to happen.”

Waterways are critical lifelines for wildlife in dry places such as California, with a whole cascade of life depending on them. Droughts mean this lifeblood no longer flows through the landscape.

Caitlin Cornwall, a project manager at the Sonoma Ecology Center, says: “There is a direct link between reversing climate change and having more birds in Bernie’s recordings.

She calls Sugarloaf “a relatively mid-range example of what happens when you have an extreme drought”.

The drought is not the only pressure. Across the state, human activity is cutting into animal food sources and habitats. Wild places are being converted into farmland and urban areas, and invasive species are becoming more common. Some of the songbirds Krause captured in 1993, such as the orange-crowned warbler, are now in widespread decline.

Many of the birds captured in Krause’s recordings are migrant species “living on a knife-edge”, says Cornwall. “If a year’s cohorts have died in a particular place, then next year the young – and even the adults – might not come back.” It could take generations for them to recolonise a habitat – assuming they survive elsewhere.

Krause, who has been recording ecosystems from Africa to Latin America to Europe, says it is depressing to hear how the places he visits have changed. His personal library contains more than 5,000 hours of recordings, taken over 55 years from all over the world. He estimates that 70% of his archive is from habitats that have now disappeared.

“The changes are profound,” he says. “And they are happening everywhere.”

“I’ve got to this point in my life now where I just don’t know quite how to handle it, or how to express it, or what to say – yet I’ve got to tell people what I see and what I hear. Actually, I don’t need to say anything – the messages are revealed through the soundscapes.”

There have been some optimistic signs at Sugarloaf Ridge. Roney has 40 cameras around the park, which have taken 60,000 photos in the past five years. He says there are hopeful indications, such as black bears and mountain lions moving into the area. Krause is 85 now and says his hearing days are numbered: he is almost totally deaf in his right ear and has some hearing loss in his left. He can no longer hear subtle changes in sound like he used to. “That’s a loss that I quite regret but have learned to live with,” he says.

Still, he looks forward to spring and to his next recording in Sugarloaf Ridge. He is hopeful that this year there could be signs of a resurgence. “The stories conveyed through the voices of these critters will tell us all we need to know that’s worthwhile,” he says. “When we finally learn how to listen.”

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The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.

Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.

The persistent wet weather has also meant a high mortality rate for lambs on the UK’s hills, while some dairy cows have been unable to be turned out on to grass, meaning they will produce less milk.

Agricultural groups have said the UK will be more reliant on imports, but similarly wet conditions in European countries such as France and Germany, as well as drought in Morocco, could mean there is less food to import. Economists have warned this could cause food inflation to rise, meaning higher prices at supermarkets.

Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, said markets had “collapsed” as farmers fail to produce food in the punishing conditions. He said: “We’re going to be importing a lot more product this year.”

One major retailer said the wholesale price of potatoes was up 60% year on year as much of the crop had rotted in the ground.

Supplies of potatoes have also been affected by a 10% reduction in the area planted last year as farmers switched to less weather dependent and more financially secure crops. Industry insiders said they expected a further 5% fall in planting this year.

Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, said: “There is a concern that we won’t ever have the volumes [of potatoes] we had in the past in the future.”

He said wholesale prices were too low for farmers to generate enough income to cope with high fuel, labour and machinery costs as well as the effects of climate breakdown. “We are not in a good position and it is 100% not sustainable.”

Supplies of carrots and parsnips, which are left in the ground and so also affected by sodden soils, are also much lower than usual, pushing up prices.

Martin Lines, the chief executive of Nature Friendly Farming Network, said: “The impact in the UK this year will significantly affect potatoes and the salad crop. Farmers are already facing delays in planting, with many fields in poor condition. If planting occurs at all, it will likely be late, potentially leading to a shortage of root vegetables and potatoes this coming winter.

“Some farmers have ceased planning for planting altogether, opting instead to put fields into fallow or switch to alternative crops. This could also result in shortages of wheat, barley and pulses as it’s currently unprofitable to grow these due to the lateness of the season and low forecasted prices.”

Guy Singh-Watson, the founder of the organic vegetable box company Riverford, said he had so far planted “virtually no veg”. “Some overgrown plants cannot wait any longer to go in the ground, and will have to be ditched.”

While retailers often turn to imports to fill gaps on shelves, farmers across Europe are enduring a similarly difficult start to the year, with difficulties developing winter crops and sowing spring crops.

France is experiencing the poorest start to its wheat-growing season since 2020 amid cold wet weather, while production of fruit and vegetables in Morocco is being affected by drought. Morocco’s second-largest reservoir has dried up, meaning irrigating crops will be difficult.

Amber Sawyer, an analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said last year almost a third of the UK’s tomatoes, and more than two-thirds of its raspberries and brussels sprouts, came from Morocco.

“As climate change worsens, the threat to our food supply chains – both at home and overseas – will grow,” Sawyer said.

Scientists have said this is just the beginning of shocks to the food supply chain caused by climate breakdown and that without rapid action to drive down emissions by ceasing to burn fossil fuels, the current system is unsustainable.

Dr Paul Behrens, an associate professor of environmental change at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said: “We should all be extremely concerned. We need to be doing everything to reduce emissions while transforming our food systems.”

He added: “If we don’t … I expect huge turmoil and escalating prices in the next 10 to 20 years. When food prices spiral we always expect political instability. I wish people understood the urgent climate threat to our near-term food security.

“Fortunately, we know many ways we can make the food system more resilient while reducing food emissions. The biggest opportunity in high-income nations is a reduction in meat consumption and exploration of more plants in our diets.”

The yew in the churchyard here has a legend as the oldest tree in Britain, although its exact age is a matter of dispute. Many propose that it is older than Christianity and some that it could even predate Stonehenge.

Perhaps a more revealing comparison arises with an “artefact” from about the same period (circa 3000BC). It’s the man called “Oetzi”, whose leathery, ice-preserved remains were extracted from a Tirolean glacier in 1991, along with his deerskin boots and bearskin cap. Oetzi carried a mark of high prestige in his little copper axe, but this state-of-the-art technology also had a handle made of the same wood as the tree in Fortingall. The Scottish yew has thus endured from the age of copper to a time when children (like those standing next to us as we visited) take Snapchat shots on smartphones.

The tree, in truth, is much reduced since 1769, when it was lassoed by Daines Barrington and measured at 15.9 metres. Souvenir hunters began hacking off parts of its monumental girth until concerned locals threw up a wall – some see it as a prison – to protect the remains. As I pondered my tree, I wondered how best to capture its full eldritch condition.

Should I photograph the blackening heartwood, some of whose laminar swirling shapes suggest the eddying surface to a pollen-stained river, but also the flames licking up from a wood fire? Or does its true exceptionalism lie in the cone-like flowers that are still sprouting at the twig ends and, at this very moment, look for all the world like any rain-sodden greenery in this landscape?

My dilemma reminded me of a pronouncement by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, known for a series of fragmentary sayings, many paradoxical in nature. Life, he proposed, was akin to music produced when the strings of a bow are laid crosswise upon a lyre. Harmony arises in the tension of these diametrically opposed strings. “The name of the bow is life,” he wrote, “and its work [the music] is death.” The Fortingall yew, which is closer to immortality than any other resident in these islands, is perhaps the most death-like life I’ve ever seen.

Intense thunderstorms are forecast across parts of the Gulf on Monday and Tuesday, bringing very high rainfall to the region and a significant flooding risk in parts.

Low pressure over the Arabian peninsula will deepen on Monday while a flow of moist tropical air moves into the region, significantly enhancing the production of showers as a result.

Shower activity will increase through Monday with the development of a line of severe thunderstorms to the east of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, which will push onwards into southern parts of the United Arab Emirates. Heavy downpours are expected, with some places expected to get up to 40mm of rain within three hours, alongside outbreaks of hail. Blustery conditions are also anticipated, with the risk of dust storms that could hinder visibility.

Widespread thunderstorms will continue to develop within the Gulf overnight, pushing farther north into the UAE and dominating the forecast throughout Tuesday. By the time thunderstorms ease on Tuesday evening, about 40mm of rain is expected to have fallen widely across northern parts of the UAE within 24 hours, with more than 100mm possible for the northernmost tip of the country.

Dubai, which typically receives about 7mm on average for the entire month of April, may get up to 100mm, with even higher totals possible.

Much of Europe has been undergoing exceptionally mild conditions for the time of year, with a multitude of records broken in Spain and France over the weekend. Temperatures in northern parts of Spain were akin to those usually experienced in summer, with highs in the 30s celsius. The maximum temperature recorded was 33.5C on Saturday at Miranda de Ebro in Castilla y Leon.

Meanwhile, more than 150 maximum monthly temperature records were broken on the same day in France, with a peak of 32.4C at Sabres. However, this is soon to change, with much cooler conditions forecast this week across much of Europe, bringing the potential for overnight frost.

Finally, it has been confirmed that March 2024 was the warmest on record globally. This is also the 10th consecutive month that has broken the average global temperature record for that month. While the heat can be linked to El Niño’s ongoing phase in the Pacific Ocean, climate scientists are concerned that records may continue to fall, even as El Niño tapers off in the coming months.