Environmental Studies

Climate crisis behind bars is heating up

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:13:23 +0000

Climate crisis behind bars is heating up Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/01/2026 - 14:13

Bradley Worrell

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� sociologist David Ciplet explains why climate change and incarceration are deeply connected

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As climate change intensifies, discussions about vulnerability often focus on coastal communities, agricultural regions or low-income neighborhoods. Much less attention is paid to the 1.2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons—many of whom face extreme heat, flooding, wildfire and other climate-related hazards with little ability to protect themselves.

For David Ciplet, a sociologist in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies whose research focuses on climate change and inequality, that oversight represents a significant gap in both climate research and public policy. His recent paper in Environmental Politics examines U.S. incarceration in a changing climate, focusing on prisons as places where environmental vulnerability and social marginalization overlap.

As Ciplet sees it, climate-related threats such as extreme heat, flooding, hurricanes and wildfires can be especially dangerous for incarcerated individuals because they have very little control over their environment. They cannot choose where they live, leave an overheated building or escape a facility threatened by natural disaster, he notes.

David Ciplet is a sociologist in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Environmental Studies whose research focuses on climate change and inequality.

At the same time, Ciplet says people who are incarcerated are increasingly being called upon to fight wildfires and respond to other climate-related disasters, but often they don’t receive training and protection comparable to professionals, or fair compensation for their work.

“How we treat those who are most vulnerable says something about our society and priorities,” he says.

From studying climate equity to prison conditions

Ciplet did not begin his career studying prisons.

His earlier research focused on making climate policy more equitable. That included work with the Just Transition Collaborative at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, which aimed to ensure that local governments’ climate policies not only prioritized addressing the environmental impacts of climate change but also didn’t contribute to rising costs or other adverse effects for low-income residents and other vulnerable communities.

As he explored questions about vulnerability and environmental justice, Ciplet says he began hearing about dangerous conditions inside Texas prisons during periods of extreme heat. Many of those facilities lack air conditioning despite increasingly extreme summers, which can result in incarcerated people enduring prolonged exposure to temperatures that can pose serious health risks, he adds.

That struck Ciplet as an obvious blind spot.

“My research has always focused on people who experience the greatest harms,” he explains. “Prisons are not the only place where that occurs, but they are one of the most severe.”

Because incarcerated individuals have no agency over where they live or control over the temperature in those facilities, Ciplet argues, it makes prisons impossible to ignore when considering who is most vulnerable to climate change.

A population largely hidden from public view

One reason the issue receives so little attention, Ciplet believes, is that most Americans never see prison conditions firsthand. Correctional facilities operate largely out of public view.

As a result, Ciplet says assumptions about prison life often differ significantly from what incarcerated individuals experience. That invisibility shapes public understanding—and ultimately public policy, he says.

Ciplet emphasizes that the American public should be concerned about climate conditions in prisons because incarcerated people are human beings deserving of basic dignity.

“I think it’s also important to point out that many (people in prisons) are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses and some were convicted under circumstances that are contested,” he says. “More broadly, there are all kinds of inequalities within our criminal legal system that disproportionately affect people who become incarcerated and how people are treated once they are in the system.

“Even if someone believes incarceration is appropriate in some cases, subjecting people to unbearable or dangerous conditions is not going to improve society, so it makes little sense.”

At the same time, Ciplet says there is the practical aspect of caring about prison conditions.

“Most people who go to prison will eventually return to their communities,” he says. “We should create dignified conditions that support successful reintegration, rather than exposing people to extreme physical and mental distress during confinement. Access to a healthy environment is a basic human right.”

Climate risks are growing

Climate-related threats to incarcerated individuals are not hypothetical, Ciplet says.

“Most people who go to prison will eventually return to their communities,” says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researcher David Ciplet. “We should create dignified conditions that support successful reintegration, rather than exposing people to extreme physical and mental distress during confinement. Access to a healthy environment is a basic human right.”

He points to rising temperatures in Colorado prisons as one example. He notes that the average temperature in Colorado has already risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1980s and is projected to increase by an additional 2.5 to 5 degrees by 2050.

“A few degrees may not sound dramatic, but if someone is already confined to a cell that reaches 95 or 100 degrees, those additional degrees matter,” Ciplet says. “We’re also seeing more extreme heat days and heat waves lasting for longer periods of time. The experience of enduring a single hot day is very different from enduring a week of extreme temperatures.”

Heat is only one concern.

“Beyond heat, incarcerated people are vulnerable to floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. Because incarcerated individuals cannot leave those dangerous conditions, climate impacts can be particularly severe for them,” Ciplet says.

He adds that climate change magnifies the vulnerabilities already built into the prison system.

The complicated role of prison labor

Ciplet sees a certain irony in that incarcerated people are often not only victims of climate-related conditions but are also part of the response, as many states rely on prison labor during emergencies.

Incarcerated workers may clear debris after storms, assist with disaster recovery or serve on fire crews battling destructive wildfires. While supporters of those efforts might point to benefits such as work experience and valuable job training, Ciplet argues it should also spur deeper questions about prison work conditions.

“In many states, incarcerated people play important roles in disaster responses, including firefighting. Yet they often are not given the same equipment and training as people who are not incarcerated and typically they are not fairly compensated for their work,” he says. “If incarcerated people are playing a major role in protecting us from natural hazards associated with climate change, we should be providing them with training and protective equipment and fair wages, as well as career pathways when they come out of prison.”

Typically, once individuals who are incarcerated complete their sentences, they face barriers that prevent them from pursuing careers in firefighting despite the valuable experience they gained while incarcerated, Ciplet says.

Meanwhile, Ciplet has reservations about correctional facilities making use of prison labor to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines or other carbon-reducing technologies. While tasking people in prisons with manufacturing “green” technologies sounds like a positive development, Ciplet says there is an underlying concern.

“Any system that becomes dependent upon prison labor can create incentives to maintain or expand incarceration,” he says. “I think we should be moving in the opposite direction.”

It’s that same concern, he says, that gives him pause when distressed communities sometimes seek to host a correctional facility as an economic development project.

“Rural communities—especially those that may have lost major industries, such as coal mining—absolutely need strong economic opportunities. The question is: What kind of development best serves those communities over the long term?” Ciplet asks. “I think we should be investing in forms of economic development that create healthy, sustainable opportunities without depending on or expanding prison populations.”

If more people knew how harmful some of the conditions in prisons are related to climate impacts, I do think people would care. I think most people believe basic human rights should be protected.”

Imagining something different

Although much of his research focuses on examining systemic problems, Ciplet also looks for examples that challenge assumptions about what prisons can become once they are shut down.

For example, he notes that some communities have proposed converting former prisons into affordable housing, community centers or facilities serving unhoused residents. Others have explored using former prisons for renewable energy projects. Ciplet points to proposals of transforming New York City’s Rikers Island correctional facility into a site for a renewable energy project.

Such projects remain uncommon, Ciplet acknowledges. Still, he says they suggest that communities are not limited to choosing between maintaining prisons and building new ones, as other possibilities exist if policymakers are willing to consider them.

For his part, Ciplet’s goals extend beyond publishing academic papers. Through the Climate and Incarceration Research Collective, which he directs, he and his colleagues are partnering with formerly incarcerated individuals in Colorado to better understand how extreme heat and cold affect health during incarceration and what policy changes could reduce those risks.

Ciplet says that work reflects a broader philosophy that research should not just describe inequality but help to address it. He says he believes climate policy can unintentionally reinforce existing injustices if decision-makers fail to consider who bears the costs. At the same time, thoughtful policy can improve environmental outcomes while advancing fairness, he says.

Asked if he is optimistic about whether society is moving toward a more equitable and sustainable future, Ciplet offers a mixed assessment.

“We are seeing policy rollbacks related to climate action, including expanded drilling and mining and reductions in support for clean-energy initiatives. At the same time, there has been a return in some areas to criminal legal priorities focused more on punishment than prevention and restorative justice,” he says.

Still, Ciplet says he remains positive.

“”I’m always hopeful,” he says. “National politics make large-scale change challenging in the near term, but there is considerable potential at state and local levels. Also, major shifts can happen unexpectedly, and public opinion can change rapidly. I am particularly encouraged by younger generations, who consistently demonstrate a strong commitment to addressing climate change.”

In the near term, Ciplet says he believes the lack of public awareness regarding extreme climate conditions incarcerated people face remains one of the biggest challenges in terms of addressing the issue.

“If more people knew how harmful some of the conditions in prisons are related to climate impacts, I do think people would care,” he says. “I think most people believe basic human rights should be protected.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� sociologist David Ciplet explains why climate change and incarceration are deeply connected.

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Top photo: Pexels

Making a political turn in the fight for animal rights

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:30:47 +0000

Making a political turn in the fight for animal rights Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/21/2026 - 06:30

Dayton Martindale and dog Geo take advantage of all of Boulder’s hiking trails, like this one in Eldorado Canyon State Park, but they especially appreciate areas where Geo has more freedom to roam off leash through the city’s Voice and Sight Program. (Photo: Dayton Martindale)

Tiffany Plate

A new journal article by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� PhD student Dayton Martindale argues that animal rights isn’t just about an absence of suffering—it’s about giving them agency

As a second grader, Dayton Martindale was pretty sure he knew what his career path would look like: He was going to be the host of a show on Animal Planet. It made sense, given how much he enjoyed being around animals and learning about them.

Around that time Martindale also started to understand that humans are mammals, just like many of the animals he loved. “I think that just stuck with me,” he says. “It affected how I looked at animals and saw them as more like myself.”

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� PhD student Dayton Martindale grew up with animals and knew from an early age that he wanted to work to protect them in some way. (Photo: Dayton Martindale)

That was the beginning of a lifetime of philosophical and moral explorations of animal rights, culminating in his current PhD work in environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. And he’s been especially prolific this year: He’s had six articles published since late 2025, all centered around two themes: How do we view animals as agents who desire their freedom, and how do we treat animal welfare as an object of public and political concern?

One article, which was published in March 2026 in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, pushes past the common thought that animal welfare simply means ending the most egregious animal abuses, giving farm animals more space to roam or taking captive animals out of small zoo enclosures—to the point of actually giving animals agency.

“This paper was meant to be a sort of stepping-stone,” says Martindale. “It’s building toward what I want to do for my dissertation, which is to reach conservation practitioners and policymakers and advocates, and to think about how non-human animals’ interests and agency can be listened to in decision-making spaces.”

The argument for agency

Martindale’s article, “Liberty, Equality, Animality: On Freedom and Nonhuman Agency,” was first drafted in his Conceptual Foundations of Environmental Studies class (taught by his advisor Ben Hale).

The argument confronts the question of whether animals care about having free will over their own lives. “In a lot of animal ethics conversations, there's a big focus on reducing animal suffering, without a positive vision of what a good life for animals actually looks like,” says Martindale. “Both in philosophy and in animal behavior and science, there is a lot of evidence that animals have interests in exercising agency and making choices.”

Scholar Dayton Martindale argues that freeing animals from captivity and a life of suffering is just the first step in giving them a good life. (Photo: Pexels)

One of the most common examples of this, Martindale says, is something called “contrafreeloading.” The concept is that many animals prefer to work for food rather than get it freely, and that they like to be actively engaged in their surroundings.

Contrafreeloading has been studied in a wide range of species—from dogs to chickens to human children—showing that they will often ignore a free bowl of food and instead choose to complete a task to get that food, Martindale says. “Scientists interpret this as there being some reward in doing the task itself.”

Martindale cites another study, in which researchers monitored giant pandas’ stress levels when they were confined to an exhibit area or given the choice to move between the exhibit or a private enclosure. “When the pandas had more freedom to move—even if they mostly stayed in the exhibit—just knowing they could move around reduced their stress levels,” Martindale says.

Experiments in other species show that other controls, like being able to change the lights in their enclosure, or to choose the order in which they completed a task, also seemed to make them calmer and happier, he says.

“I think there are limits on what can be accomplished in a zoo, especially for larger species,” says Martindale. “But what’s interesting about the framework in this paper is that it can provide a long-term aspiration—of no enclosures, or no cages at all—but it also can guide shorter term, small actions, whether in a zoo or in my house.”  

One way Martindale puts it into action in his own home is by delivering food to his shelter mutt, Geo, in a puzzle feeder, which requires him to work for his meals. Martindale also often lets Geo choose their route on a walk or takes him to parks and open spaces where he can be off leash.

“What’s interesting is he's way better behaved off leash than on,” says Martindale. “On leash he’s always pulling. But off leash he can go sniff where he wants, but he'll also turn around whenever I call his name in a way that he doesn’t when he’s on a leash.” It’s almost as if Geo is reciprocating the respect Martindale is showing him by giving him his freedom.

A shift in the movement

The themes of the article parallel what Martindale describes as a “political turn” in the animal rights discussion in the last 15 years. Activists are now exploring how to establish institutions and infrastructure that can give animals, including wildlife and domestic pets, more agency.

“Traditionally, a lot of animal ethics was saying, ‘here's why you shouldn't eat meat, and why we shouldn't test on animals, and here's why we shouldn't have zoos,’” Martindale says, adding that 50 years of telling people to be vegan has had somewhat limited success. “The political turn is saying: That's all great, but what are the institutions that societies need to either achieve these goals or represent animals in some way?”

Martindale cites Boulder’s Voice and Sight Program, as well as its off-leash dog parks, as a good example of how we can institutionally support animal agency. Another instance, he says, is the New York City Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare, which administers programs that encourage co-habitation with wildlife or promote humane solutions for reducing community cat populations.

He hopes that his writing, both academic and non-academic, might reach policymakers who plan urban spaces for dogs, relax leash laws or even install wildlife crossings over busy highways.

Putting action into practice

Currently in the third year of his PhD studies, Dayton recently defended his prospectus, which will cover ethical and political relationships with wild animals.

Prior to his PhD work, Martindale spent years working as a journalist and writer, exploring the intersection of animal rights, politics and the environment. Post doctorate, he’s hoping he can continue writing in the area of policy or advocacy work. “I love all this research, but I want it to feel connected to, informed by and relevant to social change.”

“I think animals are really interesting, intellectually, philosophically and scientifically. But that's not why I'm in this. It’s because trillions of them are tortured and killed every year. And because humans are animals too, and our own well-being on this planet is tied up in sharing it well.”

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A new journal article by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� PhD student Dayton Martindale argues that animal rights isn’t just about an absence of suffering—it’s about giving them agency.

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Politicians talk climate change on X

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:54:02 +0000

Politicians talk climate change on X Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/05/2026 - 10:54

Bradley Worrell

Study by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Meaghan Daly looks at how members of Congress framed their arguments for or against taking action on climate change on the popular social media site

For members of Congress, the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has become one of the most direct ways to communicate with constituents about their thoughts on climate change, allowing them to choose how to address the issue in an unfiltered way.

“X allows politicians to communicate directly and informally with the public, and posts occur much more frequently than polished press releases, so it provides a unique window into how politicians frame climate change in direct engagement with constituents in real time,” explains Meaghan Daly, a climate communications scholar in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies whose research focus includes climate communication and media studies.

In a new study, Daly and her co-authors analyze posts on X by members of Congress, finding that while few U.S. lawmakers now reject the science of climate change outright, conservative members tend to frame the issue in ways that discourage or delay meaningful action. Rather than denying the problem, their messages emphasize economic costs, question the feasibility or redirect responsibilities to other countries, Daly says.

Meaghan Daly is a climate communications scholar in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies whose research focus includes climate communication and media studies.

Drawing from more than 13,000 climate-related messages in 2021 from members of Congress on X, the study co-authors found a spectrum of political climate communication that ranges from active obstruction to concrete advocacy, with a large “murky middle.”

“This research challenges the idea that climate communication is just pro-climate or anti-climate,” Daly says. “It’s more complex than that, and those nuances matter when we’re trying to understand why action does or doesn’t happen.”

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Daly talks about why X offers a uniquely powerful lens for studying political climate communication and how these messaging strategies differ by party. Her remarks have been lightly edited for style and grammar and condensed for space.

Question:How did this paper come together?

Daly: I’m a member of the Media and Climate Change Observatory, headed by Max Boykoff in the Department of Environmental Studies. We’ve been doing global monitoring of media coverage of climate change for about 15 years now across newsprint, radio and television.

One of my co-authors, Lucy McAllister (assistant professor at Denison University and a research associate with the Department of Environmental Studies at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��), is also part of that group. We’ve worked on several projects over the years, including media coverage in legacy news outlets across five countries over time. Our other co-author, Siddharth Vedula (associate professor at Miami University), has also been a long-time collaborator. All three of us received our doctorates from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, and the team brought together a strong mix of qualitative and quantitative research backgrounds.

For this paper, we noted in our 2021 study on newspaper coverage that, while climate denial used to be common, more recently fewer people deny climate change outright. Instead, there’s been a shift toward questioning the feasibility of taking action.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� six years ago, a group of scholars published a paper about what they called ‘discourses of delay.’ That paper was preliminary, and in our 2021 study we noted the need to follow up and examine these discourses in greater detail—particularly how they interface with the public in the political sphere. There hadn’t been a comprehensive study of how U.S. politicians communicate about climate change on social media, so we wanted to see how these discourses of delay manifest in political communication.

But we then expanded that framework because we didn't want to just look at how is climate action being delayed, but also how is climate action being advanced, by U.S. politicians. We wanted to have this entire spectrum, looking from delay to action and everything in between, and how politicians are approaching this issue and communicating with the public about it.

Question:Why did you choose to focus on the January to December 2021 timeframe for members of Congress posting on X about climate change?

Daly: We chose 2021 because a lot was happening. The Biden Administration had recently rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, and multiple major pieces of legislation—what became the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as Build Back Better—were being actively discussed. That gave us a rich dataset and a good microcosm for understanding how climate conversations were being framed and the range of communication strategies being used.

Question:You collected more than 13,000 posts from politicians on X that were related to climate change but then focused on a much smaller subset. How confident are you that the smaller sample represents the broader dataset?

Daly: We started with about 600,000 posts and used an initial screening with established search terms from prior research to ensure they were actually about climate change, which produced a sample of about 13,000 posts. From there, we applied a randomized sampling method stratified by month, since discussion topics ebb and flow over time.

We also conducted six rounds of pilot testing to refine the codebook. Throughout, we ran randomized spot checks and maintained over 80% inter-coder agreement. The final randomized sample had 1,075 posts. Across the pilot and final analysis, we coded a total of 2,844 posts, or 21% of the total sample, which for a qualitative study is quite comprehensive and gives a detailed understanding of communication strategies.

Question:It sounds like the discussion about climate change has moved beyond whether the science is accurate to whether it is feasible to take action to address the issue?

Daly: Yes, absolutely. We saw very few posts questioning the existence of climate change or the science itself. Instead, many posts emphasized downsides—potential economic damage, harm to the fossil fuel industry or job losses. Others redirected responsibility, asking why the U.S. should act if other countries aren’t doing so. Why should we have to be the ones who are taking the lead or paying to implement some of these policies when the rest of the world isn't doing the same?

We also saw a lot of posts pushing non-transformative solutions—unproven technologies, ‘clean coal’ or these fossil fuel–based approaches that are ostensibly less polluting but, in practice, typically aren’t.

Also, we saw postings that we should only rely on things like incentives rather than government regulation or policy mandates that we act on climate change. Basically, arguing we should only have voluntary approaches to addressing climate change, rather than requiring action. So, solutions that aren’t at the scale needed to address climate change.

Question: If a conservative politician talks about job losses or other potential downsides of addressing climate change on X, how do you differentiate between them raising valid questions versus engaging in what could be considered delaying tactics?

Daly: We do know that there are always trade-offs in climate policy. We’re not trying to say that we don’t need to acknowledge those trade-offs.

For example, in making the argument that, as we shift away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy technologies, we need to make sure that those people who were working in those industries and relied on it for their livelihoods are not left behind. That’s something that I think is very important to acknowledge and that can get lost in this conversation.

We need to make sure that this is a fair transition, and that those people are connected with jobs and new opportunities in these emerging sectors that are going to create new types of jobs. That comes along with other policy components like retraining, and that’s not treated as a bad thing in our codebook.

"This study is a starting point for understanding how politicians communicate about climate change and how they might improve that communication to advance action," says Meaghan Daly. "One key takeaway is connecting climate discussion to specific actions so people don’t feel the problem is overwhelming and unsolvable." (Photo: iStock)

The way we addressed this is: If people are talking about these downsides, but they are not acknowledging the gravity of climate change at the same time—because it is this massive problem that is going to affect us all in really deep ways that are integral to how we live—that’s when we felt it qualified as delaying rather than simply acknowledging there are trade-offs in all climate policies.

Question:For those members of Congress who have been proponents of taking action on climate change, what kinds of messages did they post?

Daly: Posts promoting climate action emphasized benefits and co-benefits—health, ecosystems and quality of life. Many argued that because the U.S. has historically contributed the most to the problem, it should lead globally, especially as the country rejoined the Paris Climate Accord. There were also many posts highlighting legislation being passed or developed, budget allocations and building systems and structures for action. We describe this as ‘grounded optimism’—linking climate discussion to concrete legislative or on-the-ground action, rather than vague future hope.

Question:Do you know whether some arguments were more effective than others, either on the pro-action or delay-action side?

Daly: I think that’s a great question. This study didn’t address effectiveness in terms of public response, but I think that’s an important next step for future research.

Question:Did you find differences among members of Congress by age, race or ethnicity when it came to posting on X about climate change?

Daly: Yes. Politicians of color were more likely to post about climate change, likely because they represent constituencies on the front lines of climate impacts. Older politicians were also more likely to post about climate action, possibly because their longer tenure gives them more leeway to address controversial issues.

Question:You say in the paper that climate obstructionism can be intentional or unintentional. What do you mean by that?

Daly: One key contribution of the study is identifying what we call the ‘murky middle.’ Some communication strategies can support action or delay depending on context. For example, ‘all talk, little action’ was previously categorized as a delay (tactic), but talking about climate change does raise issue salience. However, simply talking isn’t enough—if it’s not paired with concrete strategies, people may feel overwhelmed and disengage. Posts in this category acknowledged climate change but weren’t attached to pathways for action, which can inadvertently contribute to delay.

Question:Are you planning follow-up work on this topic?

Daly: Yes. Our next step is to apply this typology over a longer timeframe. We’re exploring mixed-methods approaches, including using large language models to apply our codebook at scale, because manual coding is extremely time-intensive.

This study is a starting point for understanding how politicians communicate about climate change and how they might improve that communication to advance action. One key takeaway is connecting climate discussion to specific actions so people don’t feel the problem is overwhelming and unsolvable.

The research also challenges the idea that climate communication is simply pro- or anti-climate. It’s more of a spectrum, which opens up important avenues for future research.

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Study by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Meaghan Daly looks at how members of Congress framed their arguments for or against taking action on climate change on the popular social media site.

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Drawing out the soul of AI

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:00:28 +0000

Drawing out the soul of AI Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 07:00

Tiffany Plate

Why ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence

In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in Boulder’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.

"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.

So, he prompted AI to create a poem, then shared it at a Boulder open mic poetry night that summer—mentioning to the audience how he created it. He received mixed reviews, to say the least.

Lee Frankel-Goldwater, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, presented the AI-produced poetry at a TEDx Boulder talk in September 2025.

While some artists in the audience felt threatened and dismissed it, he says, “other people came up to me afterward and said, ‘I really see what you were trying to do there.’” His point was simply to encourage people to think about the ways that technology—like the printing press or laser cutter—have changed the course of art over the years. And to consider how one might see AI in the same light.

The open-mic experience sparked something for Frankel-Goldwater and his childhood pal, Eric Raanan Fischman, also a poet. They began playing around with AI until they teased out some groundbreaking works of cyborg poetics. The works came together in a book published last year, Lily in a Codebox, which is challenging people to think about how they might interact with AI in creative ways.

Linking art and technology

While he currently teaches environmental studies courses (e.g., Environmental Education: From Theory to Practice), Frankel-Goldwater got his undergraduate degree in computer science. He focused his thesis on exploring how technology could enhance artistic expression.

“I created a musical composition based off of a collaboration with a hidden Markov model, an early neural-network AI system, and publicly available sunspot data—linking natural systems, art and technology together,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a really long time.”

Years later, in 2013, Frankel-Goldwater attended the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, where Fischman was already a student. He fell in love with Boulder and everything that comes with it—going hiking, writing poetry and being with incredible people (it was “a deep poetic experiential melting pot!” Frankel-Goldwater says).

He returned to ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� to earn his PhD and jumped right back into the poetic community. By the time 2023 rolled around, Fischman was helping run Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and Frankel-Goldwater was a regular presence at poetry events.

The conversations that began at the open mic that summer inspired them to take their exploration of AI poetics further. They began laying the foundation for a concept that would later become a benchmark of their experiments: the Dickinson-Turing Test. The test, Frankel-Goldwater says, is all about “the space between observer and observed.”

In other words, could an AI-generated poem evoke the experience of art made by a human and cause people to be not just emotionally but also physically moved, à la Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”)

In that era of ChatGPT, though, the poems AI was producing were “missing a certain kind of flavor, or that touching human quality,” Frankel-Goldwater says. In other words, they were definitely not passing the Dickinson-Turing test.

“ChatGPT has millions of examples of human poems, but that’s actually a big problem. What it was producing looked like some weak, modernized version of an 1850s Eurocentric poetic expression. It's just not that interesting.”

So, they kept tinkering, and for Frankel-Goldwater, finding a way to guide this AI to co-create novel poetics became a bit of an obsession.

Lily in a Codebox includes the code and AI prompts that helped create the poems.

The eureka moment

After weeks spent trying to help the AI replicate a human poetic voice—without success—they changed tactics. They told it to forget all the rules and guidelines it had learned about poetry from the centuries of examples it had absorbed. Instead, they told it to write for an AI audience.

The result was not quite human—and definitely not something they’d ever seen before. The poem was a mixture of English words and code, demonstrating how it could generate poetic means and symbols unique to itself, as an AI writing for other AI.

“When we put in this one prompt, we didn't know that was going to be the ‘strike gold’ moment,” Frankel-Goldwater says.

When the pair then asked the AI to explain the poem, it said it included a hexadecimal color code for black ({000000}) to symbolize “the vast and infinite nature of the digital realm.” And at the end of the poem, it used special characters to represent an abstract form of communication that might not mean much to humans, but “could carry a wealth of meaning for an AI audience.”

Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman further prompted the AI to forego typical poetic forms almost altogether, encouraging it to experiment with new symbols and computer-like elements to create a visual style of poetry. The AI named it “Neo-Binary Visual Verse” and developed poems made purely of lines and shapes to convey concepts and meaning.

Embracing collaboration

The artistic intention and novelty behind the AI’s poetry was mind-blowing to Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman. They began to see the potential for AI to open their minds and challenge their own ways of creating poetry.

Instead of dismissing AI—or feeling threatened by it—Frankel-Goldwater hopes that artists can look to AI and ask how it can be used to push the boundaries of artistic possibility. “What new can be done for art? What can we see as possible that we can then play with on our own?” he asks.

Another hoped-for side effect of equipping AI to produce this kind of art is to steer it away from just being used in a for-profit business case. “Corporations are in an AI superpower arms race,” says Frankel-Goldwater. “Along the way, where do the people come in and say, ‘No, this is what it could be used for’?”

To that end, Frankel-Goldwater has spearheaded the AI Literacy Ambassadors Program at CU, which brings together faculty and instructors to collaboratively tackle the challenges of teaching in the age of AI—and figuring out how to leverage it to enhance their own teaching amidst a critical awareness of the concerns. He’s also begun a partnership with the Jefferson County Parks System to support the integration of generative AI into their high school environmental education programs to foster research skills and place-based awareness.

“We need people to be playing with and defining what these tools are capable of,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “Because otherwise the corporations are going to do it for us. So, if things like this can help shape the conversation a little bit, then I think we must try.”

Visit the project website to learn more about their work.

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Why ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence.

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Eyes in the sky focus on elephants

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:22:27 +0000

Eyes in the sky focus on elephants Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/23/2026 - 08:22

Forest elephants, once thought to be a subspecies of African savanna elephants, were recognized as their own species in 2021 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Part of Liam Jasperse-Sjolander’s work is to help establish a behavioral baseline. “It's really hard to protect a critically endangered species if you don't know what they're doing and where they're going.” (Photo: Liam Jasperse-Sjolander)

Tiffany Plate

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� PhD student Liam Jasperse-Sjolander is helping elephant behavioral observation get off the ground—and into the air above Africa

Walking through the quiet, lush rainforests of Gabon, on Africa’s equatorial west coast, forest elephants have a knack for appearing and disappearing just as quickly.

Because they travel in small groups through the thick jungles, forest elephants are much less noticeable—and thus much harder to observe—than their cousins that live on the wide-open African savannas.

For Liam Jasperse-Sjolander, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies PhD student, that quiet grace is part of the magic of his fieldwork. “They can be very silent, very unassuming,” he says. “Suddenly you’ll see this gigantic creature in the forest, and the next instant they’re gone.”

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� PhD student Liam Jasperse-Sjolander has been studying elephant behavior since 2016. (Photo: Alain-Djessy Banguiya)

Jasperse-Sjolander has spent years traveling through Gabon and other African countries tracking elephant behavior in a variety of ways: using radio collars, camera traps and, more recently, drones.

And he’s been publishing his findings along the way. In 2025 alone, Jasperse-Sjolander co-authored three publications, one based on data from dung collection in Gabon and two on the benefits and potential ramifications of drones in observations.

Now he’s working to collate years of field data collected from these studies—identifying behavioral patterns and their ecological implications—for his dissertation, and pondering what’s next in his research.

Discovering Africa

Growing up, Jasperse-Sjolander didn’t always know where his love of the outdoors would take him. “I just wanted to do something outside,” he says of his childhood in Colorado. “I was either going to work in science or go run off into the woods to fend for myself.”

Ultimately, he chose the former, earning an undergraduate degree in environmental biology from McGill University in Montreal. During those years he got his first taste of fieldwork, spending a semester learning about conservation and field ecology in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania—and falling in love with Africa. Why?

“From a conservation perspective I think that many areas still feel wild, with so many megafauna worth protecting. And I love the beautiful diversity and vibrancy of cultures and traditions there.”

That’s why, after finishing his undergraduate studies, he headed right back, signing on as a research assistant for a Duke University PhD student Amelia Meier, who was tracking forest elephants in the Wonga Wongué Presidential Reserve in Gabon. Jasperse-Sjolander was eager to get in the field and watch the elephants with his own eyes, and was pleased to see that Meier was interested in mixing old-school observation methods with some new technologies.

“Her approach was really interesting and it kind of opened my eyes to studying behavior in the field in new ways,” he says.

On the ground in Gabon

That approach required a few radio collars—and sorting through an awful lot of dung. Jasperse-Sjolander and his colleagues would track the forest elephants’ movements, then follow along at a safe distance to capture dung samples for later lab analysis.

The data they collected showed the makeup of the fruits and seeds the elephants were consuming in the forest, and laid the foundation for an October 2025 paper published in the journal Oikos. The article sought to model how elephants may play a role in reseeding forests with trees and other large plant species that can consume large amounts of carbon dioxide.

The results of the study showed wide variety in when and how the elephants disperse seeds, making it difficult to use a one-size-fits-all model for predicting how they will impact their local ecology.

“A lot of climate initiatives will put an emphasis on elephants being ‘gardeners of the forest,’” says Jasperse-Sjolander. These initiatives’ models assume that if elephants are in the area, carbon will in turn increase by a certain amount. “But if that’s not true in a country the size of Gabon, that’s certainly not true on an international scale.”

While there is still more work to do to better understand this interaction, Jasperse-Sjolander’s work in the field was pivotal to reaching this next step in the research.

In the air in Kenya

Now Jasperse-Sjolander is taking his fieldwork to new heights by studying how drones can be used to track elephants’ movements, eating patterns and group sizes—without disturbing the creatures. “This new format opens up a lot of doors for seeing behavior that we haven’t seen before,” says Jasperse-Sjolander.

In 2024 Jasperse-Sjolander was contracted by Save the Elephants, an African non-governmental organization dedicated to the preservation of elephants and their habitats, to analyze how drones may impact different elephant groups. “Before we start using drones to study behavior, we have to make sure that we're not negatively affecting the elephants,” says Jasperse-Sjolander.

Jasperse-Sjolander analyzed the behavioral data Save the Elephants had captured during trial runs of the drones with 14 distinct elephant groups in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. The results, which were published in November 2025 in Scientific Reports, were positive: While some of the elephants exhibited a few changes in baseline behavior—like eating a bit less or staying more alert—after multiple trial runs the group seemed generally unphased.

The researchers performing the trials adhered to some general common-sense protocols about how far to stay from the group.

“We always would launch the drone at least a half kilometer away from the group, since it's really at takeoff that it's the most noisy and disturbing,” says Jasperse-Sjolander. “Then we flew at a height of 120 meters (around 400 feet), which is the maximum height you can fly drones in Kenya. So we're basically as far away as we can be.”

Even at that distance, the latest high-tech drones can still capture high-resolution images; researchers can also use the drones’ embedded infrared camera to follow the elephants at night. That camera allowed researchers to follow some elephants for 24 hours and learn more than they ever knew about the animals’ sleep patterns.

Even at heights of 400 feet, drones’ high-resolution lenses allow researchers to capture important information, such as back length measurements, a common indicator of age. (Photo: Save the Elephants)

“Previously we’d estimated that they only sleep for 15 minutes, but we found that sometimes they’ll all lay down together in a dry riverbed and sleep for a full two hours,” says Jasperse-Sjolander.

“We didn’t really know before what elephants were doing at night,” he adds.. “And so we’re uncovering all these layers of elephant behavior that can help the population.” Knowing where they spend most of their time, when they leave an area and when they are most vulnerable to poaching are all important considerations in the business of saving elephants, he explains.

In May 2025, Jasperse-Sjolander and the Save the Elephants team also published a small field note in the journal Pachyderm about how to maximize these drones’ capabilities, even when there are restrictions on their flight (e.g., in Kenya, where drones are highly regulated). “It can still be a very useful piece of equipment,” says Jasperse-Sjolander, noting that the device’s infrared camera and potential for measuring elephant shoulder height (another common indicator of age) can all be used on the ground, and can take the place of other, more expensive equipment.

In the lab in Colorado

Now, with so much fieldwork data under his belt, Jasperse-Sjolander is back at CU working to finalize his dissertation, comparing behavior between forest and savanna elephants. He’ll build on his master’s coursework (also earned at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��), which looked specifically at the different behaviors of forest elephants in Gabon—which is 90% forest, 10% savanna—when they’re in the two different biomes.

“Most forest elephant groups are just a mother around their calf and maybe a few relatives,” says Jasperse-Sjolander, explaining that the patchily distributed fruit trees that the elephants feed on are not enough to sustain groups much larger than that.

But, when they emerge from the forest, these groups connect with other small groups.

“Elephants are still very social, and it’s important for them to keep those links and have that larger association network,” says Jasperse-Sjolander, adding that the elephants’ time in the savanna is also important for the exchange of information.

Jasperse-Sjolander’s dissertation will expand the boundaries of his comparison of forest and savanna elephant behaviors to take more of a continent-wide approach to understanding the variations between and among them.

And after that? Jasperse-Sjolander is hoping to head back to Africa for a longer contract with a non-governmental organization like Save the Elephants, where he can use learnings from his PhD to advance our understanding of elephant behavior even further.

“I like just being in Africa and being in the field,” he says. While many researchers in his field go back and forth between the U.S. and Africa, “I like to live and embody the places I study.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� PhD student Liam Jasperse-Sjolander is helping elephant behavioral observation get off the ground—and into the air above Africa.

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Researcher addresses the challenges of species survival

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:13:58 +0000

Researcher addresses the challenges of species survival Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/29/2026 - 16:13

In his Feb. 17 Distinguished Research Lecture, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Dan Doak will address the question, ‘What can we do that will actually help species survive?’

Anyone who’s ever encountered a fly or a housecat might be surprised to learn that most species on Earth are naturally rare, and that truly widespread, common species are, in fact, the exception rather than the rule. Because of this, understanding and helping species persist is a bigger challenge than most people realize.

New pressures from human activity have pushed many species closer to extinction, and many now need active management to survive. However, effective conservation isn’t just about understanding a species' biology; it also depends on management choices and political decisions that shape what’s possible and how scientific information is used.

Dan Doak, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� professor of environmental studies and Byers Family Chair in Environmental Studies, has studied species survival and climate change throughout his research career.

This will be the focus of Dan Doak’s Feb. 17 Distinguished Research Lecture “Saving Species with Science: 30 Years of Conservation Setbacks and Successes.”

Throughout his career, Doak, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of environmental studies, and his collaborators have worked with endangered species worldwide—from sea otters and spotted owls to gorgonian corals and alpine plants—asking a simple but urgent question: How do we better understand endangerment and what can we do to help endangered species survive?

While Doak was committed to conservation from a young age, it was toward the end of graduate school that he realized that combining an appreciation of species’ biological intricacies with mathematical modeling approaches could yield important insights into the analysis of conservation problems and the formulation of solutions that can direct species management. Since then, a major part of his research has focused on rare species management, including the development of general approaches and addressing the needs of specific species.

In his Distinguished Research Lecture, Doak will share three stories showing how conservation science works in the real world, where ecological research meets human values, policies and tough choices. Through the California condor, a rare Rocky Mountain wildflower and the island fox, he will explore how our understanding of extinction risk has improved even as challenges facing wildlife mount.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Dan Doak

Dan Doak is a professor and the Byers Family Chair in the Department of Environmental Studies.

Distinguished Research Lecture

What: 127th Distinguished Research Lecture, Saving Species with Science: 30 Years of Conservation Setbacks and Successes

Who: Professor Dan Doak of the Department of Environmental Studies

When: 4-5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 17, followed by a Q&A and reception

Where: Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE)

Learn more

He earned his PhD at the University of Washington and was a professor at both the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Wyoming before joining ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� in 2012.

His research features the development and use of modeling methods to better understand ecological patterns and processes and field work that investigates the ecological dynamics of multiple plant and animal species. This research includes work on the conservation and management of endangered species, climate change impacts on wild species and communities and basic research on species interactions and population dynamics.

In the first of these areas, Doak has worked to better understand the degree of endangerment and the most effective management methods for species including sea otters, island foxes, California condors, Mediterranean purple gorgonian corals and multiple rare plants.

His climate change research includes development of analysis and modeling methods, as well as a continuing 25-year study of arctic and alpine plants and their responses to climate across a wide latitude range in western North America.

Finally, he has worked with colleagues to better understand the ways that spatial patterns and changing contexts can shape ecological interactions. This area of work includes field studies of how termites create spatial structures in the East African savanna and the ways that changing ecological contexts can mediate the impacts of sea otters on kelp forest communities. 

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� the Distinguished Research Lectureship

The Distinguished Research Lectureship is among the highest honors given by faculty to a faculty colleague at CU Boulder. Each year, the Research and Innovation Office requests nominations from faculty for this award, and a faculty review panel recommends one or more faculty members as recipients.

The lectureship honors tenured faculty members, research professors (associate or full) or adjoint professors who have been with ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� for at least five years and are widely recognized for a distinguished body of academic or creative achievement and prominence, as well as contributions to the educational and service missions of CU Boulder. Each recipient typically gives a lecture in the fall or spring following selection and receives a $2,000 honorarium.

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In his Feb. 17 Distinguished Research Lecture, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Dan Doak will address the question, ‘What can we do that will actually help species survive?’

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Students learning dam good lessons from nature's busy builders

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:54:40 +0000

Students learning dam good lessons from nature's busy builders Rachel Sauer Fri, 10/31/2025 - 07:54

Jack Carter, Colin McDonald and Amanda Opp (left to right) on their way to release a beaver on private land near Nederland. (Photo: Amanda Opp)

Rachel Sauer

In a capstone project partnership with the Boulder Watershed Collective, Masters of the Environment students study what it means to live alongside beavers

Beavers are so much more than nature’s most eager builders. In many ecosystems, they play a key role in nature-based solutions to flood control, habitat restoration and fire mitigation.

They are a keystone species that can increase biodiversity in suitable habitats, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), but they also are a source of human-wildlife conflict in Colorado. For example, beavers have been known to build dams and inadvertently flood areas that ranchers or homeowners don’t want flooded.

Jack Carter, Amanda Opp and Colin McDonald (left to right) completed a Masters of the Environment capstone project studying beavers and how they live alongside humans in partnership with the Boulder Watershed Collective. (Photo: Masters of the Environment program)

The question for conservationists, land managers and any human who cares about wildlife, then, is how to live alongside this native species that broadly engenders mixed feelings. It’s a question that University of Colorado Boulder Masters of the Environment (MENV) students Amanda Opp, Jack Carter and Colin McDonald addressed in their capstone project, which they will publicly present today at the 2025 MENV Capstone Symposium.

Partnering with the Boulder Watershed Collective (BWC), Opp, Carter and McDonald examined the social perceptions and ecological impacts of beavers via surveys, research and data collection. They talked with land and wildlife managers across the Front Range to study how public agencies make beaver management decisions, and they participated in two beaver reintroductions, developing a monitoring plan to measure ecological metrics at the sites where the beavers were reintroduced.

“I think we all read the book ‘Eager’ by Ben Goldfarb, about beavers in America and how there was a high reduction in numbers from trapping in the 19^th century,” McDonald explains. “Now there’s a movement to reintroduce them, and we have this thing about ‘coexistence’ as one of those kind of trigger words. We tried to come up with multiple things like ‘living with beavers’ in place of ‘coexistence’ or ‘reintroduction,’ which somehow give off the vibe that your life is going to change by the presence of these animals coming back, which isn’t necessarily the case.”

Back from the brink

Not too long ago, the North American beaver was on the verge of extinction because of 19th-century fashions that required the under fur of beaver pelts. At their population peak before the fur trade began in earnest, there were anywhere between 60-400 million North American beavers, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), but by 1900 there were fewer than 100,000.

As beaver populations began to rebound in subsequent decades thanks to conservation and reintroduction efforts, another issue emerged: Humans had moved into beaver habitat, converting “wildlife-rich wetlands into agricultural lands” and building towns nearby, according to USFWS.

For many years along the Front Range, beavers and humans have lived in an uneasy and sometimes nonexistent détente, so one of the goals of the students’ capstone project was to gather data that might help inform CPW’s beaver conservation and management strategy, which is currently being developed.

Some of the points of conflict that Opp, Carter and McDonald learned about as they collected data included ranchers concerned about losing rangeland to flooding and homeowners who were “very concerned about mosquitoes and thinking that if beavers are creating marshy areas, the risk for West Nile increases,” Opp says.

One of the beaver releases on private land near Nederland in which Amanda Opp, Jack Carter and Colin McDonald participated for their MENV capstone project. (Video: Colin McDonald)

Working with the Boulder Watershed Collective, they learned the nuances of effective conservation, which must include education, collaboration and partnership between stakeholders, Carter says: “Due to conflicts over public infrastructure and Colorado water law, reintroducing beavers is not as easy as it may seem.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, the North American beaver was on the verge of extinction because of 19th-century fashions that required the under fur of beaver pelts. (Photo: Amanda Opp)

“I think BWC, and a lot of people involved with conservation, when they’re conveying the message of ‘Hey, these are beneficial animals,’ they have to meet people where they’re at,” Opp says. “One of biggest concerns in Colorado is fire mitigation, so when we’re thinking about unique solutions, nature-based solutions that might not have been considered in the past, beavers have been a really important pitch: ‘If you have a wet environment with wet soil and healthy grass, you’ll probably have reduced risk of fire reaching your property.’”

Not just a cute animal

The two reintroductions in which Opp, Carter and McDonald participated happened on private land near Nederland, with the landowners inviting BWC to release beavers in ponds or wetlands on their land. Several of the reintroduced beavers came from Aurora, where they had been causing problems, McDonald says, so BWC and Aurora wildlife officers worked together to ensure that the beavers were trapped in families so they could be released together.

“Beavers aren’t endangered anymore, so there’s zero protection for them,” Carter explains, adding that the areas in which the beavers were released are far from settlements, hopefully giving the beavers the greatest chance to thrive.

At one of the relocation sites, the beavers had monitors attached to their tails, enabling researchers and wildlife officials to track their movements, Opp says. And at both locations, the landowners are reporting their visual observations of beaver movement to BWC, which is included in the MENV students’ monitoring plan. Their plan also includes measuring how wide the bodies of water into which the beavers were released become.

For the students, each of whom came to the MENV program as committed conservationists, their work with beavers for their capstone project was about more than busy, charismatic rodents.

“I’m really passionate about conservation and passionate about protecting animals in the wild, and this project instilled in me how rewarding this work is,” Opp says, a sentiment that McDonald echoed, adding that he appreciated learning how to build community partnerships and how to maximize impact at small nonprofits.

“Before this, I don’t think I really appreciated beavers,” Carter says. “I didn’t realize how important they are to an ecosystem. One of the biggest things that’s happening right now is biodiversity loss, and beavers create essential habitats for moose, for certain amphibian species. A lot of amphibians are going down the drain, especially in a state like Colorado, and beavers can help solve that problem.”

“The best way to move forward with all the damage humans have done is to realize we’re not separate from our environment,” Opp says. “We have to do everything we can to protect it, and beavers are a really awesome keystone species that’s not just this cute animal; they can play an important role in solving the climate crisis.”

Jack Carter, Colin McDonald and Amanda Opp (left to right) on their way to release a beaver on private land near Nederland. (Photo: Amanda Opp)

A beaver after being released on private land near Nederland. (Photo: Amanda Opp)

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In a capstone project partnership with the Boulder Watershed Collective, Masters of the Environment students study what it means to live alongside beavers.

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Top photo: Amanda Opp

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:30:00 +0000

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/19/2025 - 07:30

Bradley Worrell

Research co-authored by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics results in liberals being less willing to buy the EVs

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s embrace of rightwing activism has not done him any favors with liberal-leaning Americans—the U.S. demographic group most inclined to purchase electric vehicles—while not resulting in any notable corresponding increase in purchase intentions among the country’s conservatives.

That’s according to a recent research paper published in Humanities & Social Sciences, which was co-authored by Amanda Carrico, an environmental psychologist whose research focus is on understanding people’s behaviors, attitudes and perceptions related to the environment. She is also an associate professor with the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies.

Carrico and her co-authors conducted five surveys of Americans between August 2023 and March of this year about their willingness to embrace 30 actions that would reduce greenhouse emissions. Purchasing electric vehicles (EVs) was the most polarizing item among those actions, with positive intentions recorded for liberals and negative intentions among conservatives.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Amanda Carrico is an environmental psychologist whose research focus is on understanding people’s behaviors, attitudes and perceptions related to the environment.

However, in the past three surveys (May 2024, July 2024 and March), liberals have pumped the brakes regarding their intentions to buy Teslas—and that decline is associated with Musk’s relatively recent embrace of rightwing politics, Carrico says.

“We definitely find that overall intentions to purchase Tesla seems to decrease over time, so there seems to be an intensification of rejection of Teslas among liberals as Musk’s conservative persona emerged,” she says. That’s particularly significant given that liberals are the demographic group most inclined to purchase electric vehicles, she adds.

What's at stake when EV tax credits end Sept. 30?

“At the same time, conservatives have been pretty predictable across the entirety of the surveys: They just aren’t interested in EVs,” Carrico says. “As Elon Musk was shifting to the right, our initial theory was: Maybe we’ll see conservatives become more interested in EVs, because you’ve got this now conservative figure in the industry who is excited about EVs because of their benefit to the environment. We thought we might be on the precipice of EVs becoming a less polarized issue. However, that has not turned out to be true.”

To support their research on Musk’s impact on the Tesla brand, Carrico and her co-authors also point to a series of Morning Consult polls showing a steady decline in self-reported willingness to buy a Tesla among Democrats since 2023. Separately, a Data for Progress poll found two-thirds of Democrats and half of Independents reported that Musk had made them less likely to buy a Tesla.

Recently, Carrico spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine regarding the findings and implications of the research paper. Her responses have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity and condensed for space.

Question: Your team conducted five surveys between November 2023 and March of this year. Was it always the plan to ask specifically about Musk and Teslas, or did that come later?

Carrico: The idea came later, so it was opportunistic. It was interesting to us to see from the beginning that EVs were among the most polarizing action items, so we asked ourselves in 2024 if we should modify the question from EVs generally to Teslas.

There were two motivations for that. One was: How are people’s opinions shifting in response to this emergent political shift (by Musk)? The second was: We felt like we needed more information about people’s opinions about EVs generally versus Teslas, so some respondents were asked about EVs and some were asked about Tesla specifically, and that’s where you could see some delineation between those two categories.

Question: If Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics cost him the support of liberals without picking up notable support from conservatives, did he basically drive Tesla sales into a proverbial ditch?

"We thought we might be on the precipice of EVs becoming a less polarized issue. However, that has not turned out to be true,” says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researcher Amanda Carrico. (Photo: Dylan Calluy/Unsplash)

Carrico: I would not want to speculate on the underlying economics of Musk’s portfolio. A lot of his businesses are interconnected, and a lot of the technologies are interconnected.

But just purely looking at the impact of his political persona in relation to consumer interests in purchasing Teslas, and also the market data about purchasing Teslas, it does seem very clear that there is a decline in consumer interest in Teslas. Of course, business leaders and public figures make value judgments all the time, just like we all do. We don’t know if this decision (by Musk) was driven by economics or other factors. …

I personally would stop short of making a judgment about whether that was a smart decision or an unwise one, but you can certainly see that relationship (Musk’s embrace of a conservative persona and a declining interest among liberals to buy Teslas) play out in our data and the market data that we were able to acquire during the project.

Question: Do you have thoughts as to whether Tesla could regain support, particularly support from liberals, if Musk either stepped away from his company or perhaps walked back some of his rightwing views?

Carrico: I think there are some insights we could look to, to make an educated hypothesis on what might happen there. I will say, I think once something becomes politically polarized, like becoming aligned with a political identity, it’s very hard to undo that. Politics are very sticky, so it becomes hard to shed that.

With consumer behavior, we have seen a lot of companies recover from these kinds of things. For example, Budweiser being boycotted several years ago in response to their alliance with a transgender influencer. That was different, though, because Budweiser wasn’t entering into the political arena.

This is a very different thing, with Musk being the figurehead of a company. Tesla is unique in how tied Musk is to Tesla. For comparison, I don’t know how many people in America could tell you who is the leader of Nissan or Suncor or other companies, but Musk is uniquely visible in his role with Tesla.

Question: Do you have any thoughts as to how other EV manufacturers should respond to the survey findings when it comes to branding or messaging?

Carrico: Clearly, liberals want to explore EVs. I think it’s clear that it’s aligned with their identity. One interesting thing in this study that was very surprising to us is that the disinterest in EVs that started to grow over the course of the study wasn’t just isolated to Teslas. We started to see it bleed over into interest in purchasing EVs in general.

I wondered if that wasn’t so much a rejection of EVs as a disinterest in one of the leading vehicles in the EV market. Teslas were considered state-of-the-art in many respects. The charging infrastructure for Teslas feels quite superior to other alternatives, so it does feel like there’s a consumer demand that’s not being met by other alternatives.

"Teslas were considered state-of-the-art in many respects. The charging infrastructure for Teslas feels quite superior to other alternatives, so it does feel like there’s a consumer demand that’s not being met by other alternatives," says Amanda Carrico, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor and department chair of environmental studies.

Of course, that’s easier said than done, but insofar as there are opportunities for other producers to fill this space—to offer purchasing opportunities that are not Tesla but that fulfill the same goals and amenities as Tesla offered—I think that’s a real opportunity, and I’m sure they are scrambling to take advantage of that.

Question: A number of media outlets have reported on the study’s findings. What kind of reaction has the paper been generating?

Carrico: It’s been very interesting because the reaction has depended heavily upon the political orientation of the news outlet, which is perhaps not surprising. If it was covered by a more liberal outlet—Mother Jones, for example—the main takeaway was, ‘Look at Elon Musk. What a fool he was, shooting himself in the foot.’

Then if you look on the right—it’s been covered by Breitbart, for example—the narrative has been, ‘Look at these liberals rejecting these products that solve the problem they care so much about,’ meaning climate change.

There’s been accurate depictions of the findings in the paper, but also it’s been interesting because anyone can take what they want out of the paper and spin it, or link it, to their political identity.

Question: Do you think this is a topic you and your co-authors will revisit, perhaps to see how opinions on EVs in general, and Teslas in particular, evolve over time?

Carrico: To be honest, we have not talked about it yet, but I would not be surprised if that happens. Writing papers like this, there’s a lot of work to get one completed, and the review process can be long and tedious. But the team (of co-authors) is still meeting, and so I anticipate that within the next few months we’ll be revisiting things, deciding what we want to focus on next and trying to understand how polarization impacts a range of behaviors.

There is an aspect of this project that is trying to understand things people do agree on. Specifically, where is there less polarization? Because those areas are appealing targets for public policy, with the idea (that) we can make progress on the areas we agree on and wait for things we don’t agree on to see if there’s opportunities in the future.

I hope that this moment fades, so that we can move away from this rancor around EVs. I’m really hopeful about the potential of decarbonization and how that is linked with a changing of the vehicle fleet (from combustion engine to EV), so I still think there’s a lot of potential there, and I’m hopeful we will still see some renewed interest in this technology. I think we will.

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Research co-authored by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics results in liberals being less willing to buy the EVs.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researcher named one of 2025 Grist 50

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:31:21 +0000

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researcher named one of 2025 Grist 50 Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/18/2025 - 15:31

Zia Mehrabi joins a cohort of leaders from across the U.S. who are working on solutions to the planet’s biggest challenges

Zia Mehrabi, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Better Planet Laboratory, has been named one of the 2025 Grist 50, an annual list of leaders from across the U.S. who are working on solutions to the planet’s biggest challenges.

The Grist 50 features “climate leaders across the U.S. who are tackling some of the most pressing problems of today in innovative and exciting ways,” according to Grist, a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. “The list provides an annual dose of inspiration and a reminder that the stories we tell about climate change are incomplete without the narratives of those fighting back, bringing change to their communities and inventing a better future.”

Illustration: Grist

The Grist 50, whom the organization calls “fixers,” includes “creatives bringing powerful stories to new audiences, advocates pushing for healthy and just food systems and tech wizards putting AI to work for more efficient energy infrastructure. These leaders have pushed back against harmful industries (and won), cut carbon emissions from hospitals, advanced wildfire solutions from Hawai‘i to California and brought together unlikely coalitions to break ground on clean energy networks. They’re teachers, scientists, doctors, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs, and activists who are putting climate front and center in their work and driving real progress,” according to Grist.

Mehrabi and the Better Planet Laboratory are a group of data scientists and creatives who build data products and services for a better and fairer planet. They work to scale their impact through partnerships with a range of partners across the world, from intergovernmental agencies to grassroots NGOs and human rights organizations. Their work has included mapping the world agricultural lands, the agricultural workforce and the climate stress they face, the global flows of food across the world from producers to consumers and the human cost of consuming carbon-intensive products, as well as the potential for alternative ways of farming, and more.

Mehrabi and the Better Planet Laboratory are focused on mapping violations of the United Nations resolution of the human right to a healthy and safe environment and using modern technologies to support the United Nations Committee on Rights of the Child’s efforts to tackle grave violations of children's rights, among other projects.

Earlier this year, Mehrabi won the U.S. National Champion Frontiers Planet Prize, and one of three international Frontiers Planet awards, for co-authoring groundbreaking research studying how adding diversity back into agricultural systems in 11 countries might improve environmental and social outcomes.

“It’s common to hear people say you are a product of your environment,” Mehrabi says. “I think what we sometimes forget is that our environment is a product of us, too—that we can change the world we live in, and there are so many inspiring people in the U.S.A. doing this right now.”

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Zia Mehrabi joins a cohort of leaders from across the U.S. who are working on solutions to the planet’s biggest challenges.

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Top illustration: Grist

Who is afraid of the big, bad (dire) wolf?

Kylie Clarke — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:28:17 +0000

Who is afraid of the big, bad (dire) wolf? Kylie Clarke Tue, 07/22/2025 - 09:28

Bradley Worrell

Advancing science may make it possible to bring back extinct species like the dire wolf—but should it? ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� environmental studies and philosophy Professor Ben Hale says the answer is complicated

Earlier this year, Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences made headlines when it announced that—through the science of genetic manipulation—it had successfully re-created three dire wolves, a large wolf species that ranged across North America and South America some 10,000 years ago before going extinct. Some news outlets, including Time magazine, called the development species “de-extinction” while others touted it as “scientifically seismic.”

Subsequently, other scientists challenged Colossal’s assertions of having de-extincted the species, arguing that these wolves—Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi—did not meet the technical definition of dire wolves. That’s because Colossal did not create the animals from a fully reconstructed dire wolf genome but instead relied on a gray wolf’s genetic material and made changes to it with ancient DNA recovered from dire wolf specimens.

Meanwhile, Colossal has announced plans to bring back a variety of other extinct species, including the wooly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger (or Thylacine) and most recently the Moa, a giant flightless bird that stood about 12 feet tall and weighed about 500 pounds.

However, seemingly lost amid the claims and counterclaims of whether scientists can bring back dire wolves—or any other extinct animals—from extinction is the deeper philosophical and ethical issue: should they?

As a University of Colorado Boulder philosophy professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, Ben Hale’s primary research focus is on environmental ethics and policy. He has followed the news reports about bringing back dire wolves and other long-gone animals through the lens of ethical issues associated with the extinction and de-extinction of species.

For his part, Ben Hale has no easy answers. A University of Colorado Boulder philosophy professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, Hale’s primary research focus is on environmental ethics and policy. He has followed the news reports about bringing back dire wolves and other long-gone animals through the lens of ethical issues associated with the extinction and de-extinction of species.

Recently, Hale spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine regarding his thoughts on when it makes sense to attempt to de-extinct a species (and when it doesn’t); what it means to de-extinct a species, ethically speaking; how ethicists in the larger scientific community are responding to the latest scientific breakthroughs; and his thoughts on the ethical implications of de-extincting a T-Rex. His responses have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity and condensed for space.

Question: Setting aside the issue of whether Colossal actually created dire wolves, or just something similar, why would we want to bring back an extinct species of wolf?

Hale: That’s the question, right? For some (scientists and entrepreneurs), I think there’s the relatively straightforward scientific challenge of seeing if it can be done—to de-extinct a species. The dire wolf happens to be a particularly charismatic species in no small part because it’s a large mammal that has some resemblance to a dog. Popular fantasy shows like Game of Thrones elevated the ecologically real dire wolf species even further, to a kind of magical status, so there’s an element of fantasy and science fiction that makes the dire wolf intriguing.

Still, that doesn’t speak to the kind of public-facing rationale offered by Colossal Biosciences or other folks who are engaged in de-extinction efforts. Let’s call them ‘de-extinction optimists.’ It’s not enough, generally speaking, just to say, ‘We wanted to see if we could do it,’ or ‘We did it because we think the species is beautiful or cool.’ Using that as a justification starts to look a lot like Jurassic Park, right? And Michael Crichton and Stephen Spielberg and numerous others have warned us about technology unchained with these cautionary tales.

Hale says he believes part of the appeal of de-extincting dire wolves is because they resemble a dog and that popular TV shows such as Game of Thrones have elevated the status of real dire wolves to an almost magical level.

So, the public-facing justification that de-extinction optimists will offer is that we ‘owe it to the species,’ possibly because we’ve made that species extinct by something we’ve done—say, human-caused extinction—or because extinct animals can serve as important elements or components of the ecological system, given that some ecosystems are not healthy. You can make the case that we can revive those ecosystems by reintroducing apex predators that were playing a valuable regulatory function.

Question: If you bring back a creature from extinction, but the natural habitat for it no longer exists, how much have you accomplished?

Hale: I think this a question that looms large over the matter of de-extinction, particularly in an era of accelerated climate change. It may be the case that we can bring back a species that is genetically similar to a past species, but we may not have done anything to make that species function within the ecosystem. Is it in that case true that we’ve brought back the species? Does it even make sense to speak of a species outside of its ecological context?

One of the stated reasons for de-extincting a species is to revive or rejuvenate deteriorating or degraded ecosystems. If you think the environment has been degraded to such an extent that it needs to have some kind of apex predator that was roaming the earth 10,000 years ago, like the dire wolf, reintroduced into the ecosystem, then it’s not clear what it means even to say that the species has been brought back. It’s not back at all. It’s just isolated somewhere. Keeping it as a specimen in Colossal Biosciences laboratories (as the company has done) doesn’t actually de-extinct the species, in my opinion.

Now, you could say that genetic replication is just the first step in a proof-of-concept de-extinction effort, and the next step is to create enough of the species that scientists can develop a viable population and then release them into the wild. Then perhaps that’s the ultimate step to de-extinction.

But if your criterion is that whatever species is brought back derives its status from its function in the system, then it’s a mistake for them to suggest that they have de-extincted the species—because they haven’t yet done that.

Question: Generally speaking, how do ethicists within the scientific community think about the idea of de-extincting species? And what is your position on this subject?

Hale: I would argue that most environmental ethicists, as well as most animal ethicists—these are two different communities of ethicists who agree on some things but disagree on many others—are extremely skeptical of these efforts to de-extinct species. I think you’re going to be hard pressed among the ethics community to find people who are excited about the potential of these de-extinction technologies.

Personally, I tend to be more of a moderate regarding technologies such as these. My view—unlike some of my other colleagues at other universities—is that developing technologies like this can help us to address ecological issues in the near term, but that this gets much more complicated as we reach back in history.

With extinction, an animal can either go functionally extinct or ontologically extinct, which are two different things. For instance, the oysters in the Chesapeake Bay are often said to be functionally extinct. There are still oysters living in the Chesapeake Bay, but they’re not serving the function that they were once serving, which was the cleaning and purification of the bay.

In that context, it would be a much more meaningful outcome for us to revive or to de-extinct oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, say, than to de-extinct the dire wolf. Oysters are important for us, and they were vitally important to many communities in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. I think we should use technologies to de-extinct functionally extinctorganisms and species.

So, it’s a balance. We don’t want to drop the ball on the de-extinction discussion inasmuch as its an important tool for ecologists, but we also don’t want to introduce Jurassic Park-style scenarios where we fetishize a charismatic species simply because it is genetically related to something that we like. Also, as we get deeper into time and deeper into history, I think it becomes more ridiculous and more problematic, ethically speaking, for us to try to de-extinct a species.

Question: So, bringing back oysters to Chesapeake Bay could fulfill a useful ecological role, but ethically it’s harder to make the case for bringing back a Tyrannosaurus Rex?

Hale: Is the de-extinction of a T-Rex the best use of our resources? My answer to that question is probably not.

Again, I’m generally supportive of research into a variety of different technologies that help us better understand how nature works and what we can do to address concerns in our natural environment. And it may well be that some of these gene-splicing technologies do precisely that.

Dire wolves Romulus and Remus, along with their sister, Khaleesi, will spend their entire lives in an animal refuge. Hale says there are ethical questions as to whether a species is really made de-extinct if it’s natural habitat no longer exists.

I believe it’s important for us as a society to have robust technologies, maybe even de-extinction ones in cases ofcatastrophe or calamity—much like seed banks or insurance policies—but we certainly should have security in place in case things go sideways.

Question: Are there any governmental regulations at the international level, or at the national level, governing this kind of scientific work? If not, do you think there should be?

Hale: This is not an area that I tend to work in, but I’m not aware of any regulations. Personally, I do think that this kind of private sector, entrepreneurial research should be regulated.

What would it mean to regulate more pure scientific research is an interesting question. I think it would mean that you would have some kind of external scrutiny of scientific operations in an open framework that would prevent opportunists from developing a technology that could be either weaponized, which would be unusual in this context, or that would prevent ecological recklessness, as in the case of an accidental or intentional release. Given the potential ecological, environmental, and economic impacts of release, we should be very careful about allowing self-replicating but misfit entities, like a de-extincted species, into the wild. The potential for misuse here is tremendous.

I think there probably are other reasons to regulate it as well. You might be concerned about the harm or suffering that you might cause to any given specimen of that species. For example, if you’re creating a huge laboratory of failed experiments with de-extinct species—say, a bunch of failed versions that die prematurely or live out their short lives in pain—I think that should also have some oversight.

Question: So, potentially in the pursuit of a scientific good, scientists could, possibly inadvertently, cause harm to the animals?

Hale: This was an issue with the cloning controversy, when Dolly the sheep was cloned. Anytime you’re experimenting with technologies of this sort, you’re going to create some mutants or some mistakes during trial runs—and there were quite a few of those when Dolly was cloned. Some of the animals had short lives or they were born with mutations and whatnot.

This is one of the key worries for animal ethicists: that the animal will be born with defects that will cause it to suffer, or maybe that it’s destined to spend its entire life in captivity being poked and prodded. …

There are a range of different reasons why animal ethicists think that we should be concerned about the well-being of animals. Some of them include their capacity to experience pain and suffering, and some of them are more abstract, likethat they have rights. So, depending upon which sort of camp you fall in in the animal ethics literature, you may object to de-extincting individual entities for different reasons than environmental ethicists, but two sets of concerns—about the ecology and about the individuals themselves—sort of work in tandem with one another.

Question: Do you think there is a risk that, if scientists show they can successfully bring back extinct species, some people will come to believe that conservation efforts are no longer necessary?

Hale: I think we should be thinking hard about the problem of extinction. The reason I’m interested in de-extinction is not just because I think it’s cool, but because I think it provides a good reason for us to try to prevent extinction in the first place. That’s my real objective in exploring the question of de-extinction.

“It’s not enough, generally speaking, just to say, ‘We wanted to see if we could do it,’ or ‘We did it (de-extincted a species) because we think the species is beautiful or cool.’ Using that as a justification starts to look a lot like Jurassic Park, right?”
Ben Hale, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� philosophy professor in the Department of Environmental Studies

I think we have good reasons to try to prevent extinction and that de-extinction alone is not going to be a solution to the problem of extinction. Potentially, it just introduces more problems. So, we should try where we can to prevent the extinction of animals or the extinction of a species.

In fact, in a lot of my work I discuss different kinds of reversal scenarios, from air pollution to geoengineering to remediation. Thinking about repair and restoration helps us see better that many of our most basic intuitions regarding environmental wrongdoing aren’t, strictly speaking, about the harm that we’re doing to the environment. For instance, those who think that a company can pollute a river, say, and then right their wrong by cleaning up the pollution using remediation technologies, have a pretty limited sense of what an environmental wrong is. Environmental wrongs also happen in part because people are trespassed upon, their rights are violated, or there are other offenses to them and the world. Those kinds of cases are not properly related to de-extinction, but all of them are an effort to try to repair past harms or restore lost value, just as de-extinction is an effort to return something that is lost.

In many cases—maybe even in most cases—I think we should essentially operate under the assumption that interventions like de-extinctions are cases of last resort. And this goes for many different kinds of environmental interventions like the ones I mention above: We need to try to avoid circumstances in which we need to take drastic action to repair things that we’ve done that are damaging or wrong.

Question: Do you expect that, moving forward, companies like Colossal Biosciences will continue to pursue efforts to bring back extinct species?

Hale: I do. Again, I’d like to see scientists and governments deal with this globally, to set up some kind of commission to create some kind of oversight or monitoring that nudges private companies away from technologies that could be used recklessly, such that they threaten existing ecosystems. This is part of the reason that I think we should be cautious about de-extinction intervention overall. We just don’t know what the downstream impacts of our actions are going to be.

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Photos courtesy of Colossal Biosciences

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