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Prompted by a 2020 Earth Island lawsuit with its ALERT Project, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently updated its rules governing use of dispersants and other oil-spill-mitigating products. The revisions are a welcome policy change after 29 years –– but only if planners choose to use them. While the EPA closed many loopholes of concern that have allowed toxic products to be used for decades, the agency also delegated critical decision-making authority to local, state, and regional planners, allowing them to set even more stringent standards for use of dispersant and other oil-mitigating products. Read the press release here. Photo of a 2019 rally in Seattle on the thirtieth memorial of the Exxon Valdez oil spill by Elizabeth Krawczak.

Earth Island Journal’s Summer issue is now available on newsstands and online. This edition includes articles about how researchers are using centuries-old whalers’ logbooks to inform our current understanding of whales and the climate crisis, the significant strides being made by Brazil's landless workers movement, and two self-taught animal doctors in Delhi who are caring for the city's injured birds of prey. Help Earth Island Journal continue to produce deeply reported stories like these by subscribing or gifting a subscription, or by making a donation to our Green Journalism Fund.

Earth Island’s Wild Oyster Project, which works to restore oyster reefs and bring back native oysters in the San Francisco Bay, has just expanded its reach through two new partnerships. The REAP Climate Center, an ecological campus in Alameda, California, has provided the Wild Oyster Project with a new East Bay hub for shell collection and community outreach. In addition, The Cook & Her Farmer, a restaurant in the historic Swan’s Market area of Oakland, California, is the newest restaurant partner to donate their oyster shells to the Wild Oyster Project so they can use them to build reefs. Stay engaged in this project’s work by following them on Instagram.

On June 1, the District of Columbia Superior Court handed an incremental win to Earth Island and its Raptors Are The Solution (RATS) project when a court allowed our lawsuit to proceed over the objections raised in a motion to dismiss by rodenticide manufacturer Bell Laboratories, Inc. The lawsuit may now advance to the merits, which is whether Bell Laboratories is misleading consumers with false statements about its deadly rat poison products that impact non-target wildlife. On other fronts, nine months after RATS won a lawsuit against the California Department of Pesticide Registration (DPR), the agency recently announced that it would put diphacinone into formal reevaluation; DPR is accepting public comments until July 19. And on May 30, a California state bill (co-sponsored by RATS) that would impose more restrictions on diphacinone advanced by passing in the Assembly.

Earth Island’s Law Students for Climate Accountability, a student-led movement pushing the legal industry to phase out fossil fuel representation, recently released its first-ever report on the UK legal industry's work for fossil fuel companies and the role top-ranked law firms play in exacerbating the climate crisis. The alarming reality detailed in the report outlines 55 firms facilitated £1.48 trillion in fossil fuel projects, more than 2.5 times the amount these firms facilitated for the renewable-energy industry (£546 billion). More information here.

The second of five United Nations sessions to develop a legally binding treaty on plastic pollution recently took place in Paris. A representative from Earth Island’s Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) attended the talks and presented letters to the UN and U.S. delegation signed by PPC’s business members and 37 aligned organizations calling for real solutions and a strong stance on the treaty. Following the session, the New York Times ran a letter to the editor by Erica Cirino, PPC’s communications manager, which reiterated the urgency of turning off the tap on plastic production and pushing back on false solutions and harmful narratives. Photo of the “Perpetual Plastic Machine” by artist Ben Von Wong.

Earth Island’s Green Schoolyards America is dedicated to supporting systems change to transform asphalt-covered school grounds into living schoolyards. The project is currently rallying support from organizations to endorse the Living Schoolyards Act (a coalition of 200 groups is already behind this). Introduced in the Senate by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the groundbreaking bill would direct important federal resources toward transforming school grounds into living schoolyards. Organizations can sign on here, and other ways for individuals to help can be found here.

Earth Island’s International Marine Mammal Project is working with allies to end Iceland’s whaling once and for all. Only Japan, Norway, and Iceland ignore the global moratorium on commercial whaling set in place by the International Whaling Commission, even though a new poll shows that a majority of Icelanders oppose whaling. Iceland’s government has expressed concerns with whaling and is considering ending the cruel practice. Iceland’s minister of food, agriculture, and fisheries recently commissioned a study that looked critically at the hunts, which last year killed 148 endangered fin whales, with most of the meat going to Japan. Learn more and take action here.

The IslandWire editorial team would like to thank Earth Island Summer 2023 intern Joanne Yen for her assistance with this issue.