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Powerful institutions treat geography as a matter of ownership rather than responsibility. A forest becomes a petroleum reserve. A river becomes an industrial waste repository. An olive grove becomes a security concern. The people who depend upon these landscapes are expected to accommodate whatever transformation someone more powerful has planned for them.

Tuesday’s broadcast traveled between three seemingly distant places: Alberta, Canada; East Palestine, Ohio; and the occupied West Bank. Their circumstances differ enormously, but each raises the same fundamental question: Who controls the land, and who must live with the consequences?

Alberta’s fossil fuel empire faces a political reckoning

The Barometer Report began with Canada, where Alberta’s separatist movement suffered an overwhelming electoral defeat earlier this week.

On Monday, 75% of voters opposed beginning the process of separating Alberta from Canada.

But the movement’s political grievances extend well beyond provincial identity.

Alberta sits atop one of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, primarily in the form of bitumen extracted from its oil sands. The province’s fossil fuel industry generates enormous revenue, but its environmental costs extend far beyond its borders.

According to Canada’s national greenhouse gas inventory, Alberta produced approximately 260 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2024, nearly 38% of Canada’s total. That excludes emissions from burning exported petroleum abroad.

But climate pollution is only part of the damage.

Industrial extraction has fragmented boreal forests, disturbed wetlands, transformed watersheds, and produced vast reservoirs of contaminated waste. Evidence of contamination extends well beyond oil sands extraction sites. In some cases, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were found as far as 90 kilometers from operation sites.

Earlier research documented industrial contaminants deposited onto snow and entering the Athabasca River watershed, challenging claims that elevated pollution could be explained entirely by naturally occurring bitumen.

More recent research has identified substantial atmospheric emissions from oil sands tailings ponds, enormous industrial reservoirs containing contaminated water, sediments, and residual petroleum. A 2020 study demonstrated that these waste repositories can contribute significantly to atmospheric pollution.

The consequences extend to Indigenous communities whose lands, waters, livelihoods, and treaty rights are affected by industrial development. Restoring an excavated landscape does not necessarily restore the ecological relationships that sustained it.

Alberta’s voters rejected political separation from Canada. Whether the province can separate its economic future from increasingly destructive fossil fuel extraction remains a far more consequential question.

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East Palestine: When environmental evidence becomes a legal battleground

On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing hazardous chemicals and ultimately leading to the controversial burning of vinyl chloride from several tank cars.

More than three years later, residents are still fighting for accountability.

Nearly 900 residents have filed lawsuits against attorneys involved in the $600 million Norfolk Southern settlement and other parties, including East Palestine Justice, an organization associated with Erin Brockovich.

The victims included evidence that important environmental testing results were withheld while residents were encouraged to accept compensation and surrender future personal-injury claims.

How can people make informed decisions about their health, homes, and legal rights without access to the evidence?

Like Alberta, East Palestine demonstrates that contamination is not merely a matter of chemistry. It is also a question of who controls scientific information, who interprets the risks, and who is expected to bear them.

Palestine: When land becomes a weapon

The second half of Tuesday’s broadcast brought those questions into a more immediate setting.

Researcher, technology entrepreneur, and environmental advocate Aalia Mauro joined me to discuss our recent travels through the occupied West Bank, where we accompanied Palestinian communities facing violence, intimidation, and restrictions on access to their agricultural land.

We witnessed threatening incidents ourselves, including an encounter involving dogs and another in which armed men pursued members of our group.

Mauro recalled the proliferation of Israeli flags along roads passing through Palestinian territory.

“There were literally flags every 10 feet,” she said.

In a landscape shaped by military occupation, settlement expansion, and unequal control over land, such displays can become declarations of authority.

In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful. The court examined settlement expansion, restrictions on movement, land confiscation, and exploitation of natural resources.

These policies are particularly devastating for Palestinian agricultural communities.

Olive trees represent far more than income. They are living connections between generations, often cultivated by families for decades or centuries. Destroying an olive grove can erase both a livelihood and an inheritance.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented escalating attacks against Palestinian olive harvesters, damage to agricultural property, and restrictions preventing farmers from reaching their fields.

Agricultural dispossession does not always require confiscating legal ownership. Preventing people from tending, maintaining, or harvesting their land can make that land economically useless.

During our travels, we met families living under these pressures, including Palestinian Americans whose homes and agricultural property had been attacked. Their experiences revealed how intimidation can turn ordinary acts, like harvesting olives, maintaining a field, traveling home, into potentially dangerous undertakings.

We also discussed how technology and disinformation can distort public understanding of violence. A video may capture a confrontation while concealing the restrictions, threats, and historical circumstances that preceded it.

“The existence of homes does not negate the presence of oppression,” I observed during our conversation.

Mauro described the emotional difficulty of leaving the communities we visited.

“I feel like we abandoned them,” she said.

It is a feeling difficult to escape when the people who welcomed you remain exposed to dangers you were able to leave behind.

What the land remembers

Alberta’s boreal forests, East Palestine’s contaminated neighborhoods, and Palestine’s olive groves are not interchangeable. Their histories and injustices differ.

But each reveals what happens when institutions wield disproportionate power over land, resources, and the information used to justify their actions.

Lake sediments preserve evidence of industrial contamination. Environmental testing can reveal what official assurances overlook. Maps expose the fragmentation of occupied territory. Eyewitness testimony records what powerful institutions would prefer to deny.

The land remembers what is done to it. Contaminants accumulate. Forests bear the scars of excavation. Olive trees stand, or fall, as witnesses to generations of cultivation.

The question is whether the rest of us are willing to pay attention.

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Some of the most meaningful work of my career has been alongside Indigenous communities fighting to preserve their lands, histories, and ways of life. Those experiences profoundly shaped how I understand geography, science, and our responsibility to the people whose stories have too often been erased.

This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’m sharing the extraordinary work of artists and cartographers who are reclaiming those stories, one map at a time.

Mesoscale News exists to tell the stories that deserve more attention, especially when they challenge the powerful, confront uncomfortable histories, or give voice to communities too often ignored. If you believe in journalism grounded in science, guided by compassion, and unafraid to speak truth to power, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support makes this work possible.

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Qusra: The Geography of Dispossession is one part of a multi-part multimedia series I’m publishing here on Mesoscale News.

My trip to the West Bank and the work I do here is only possible through your support. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or donating directly here.

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QUSRA, WEST BANK, PALESTINE — In the back room of an otherwise plain and colorless municipal building, the names and photos of twelve young men murdered by Israeli military and settler terrorists looked down on us as we arrived.

The memorials were hung over the meeting space as a reminder of the increasing violence against Palestinians, and of the freedom that has become an artifact of the past.

Palestinian Muslim families have been living in Qusra since at least the 1500’s. In the 1882 Survey of Western Palestine, Qusra was described a small village low in the valley, a few hundred inhabitants, with large olive and oak trees.

The 1922 Census of Palestine showed 707 people in Qusra; by 1931, 851 people; and in 1961, the Jordanian survey counted 1,312 people.

During the 19 years of Jordanian rule, Qusra flourished. Then Israel began illegally occupying the West Bank in 1967, and families began living under siege.

Then in 1995, the Oslo II Accords took the 2,500 acres of Palestinian land in Qusra and cut it in half — 50% would be in Area B and 50% in Area C.

Israeli stole another 50 acres to build the illegal settlement of Migdalim.

Migdalim, like most illegal Israeli settlements and outposts, was built on Palestinian agricultural lands — mostly olive groves and orchards.

By 2010, 50 homes had been built on the area. Today, Migdalim has a population of more than 800 people.

Earlier this year, Israel approved an expansion of 140 new homes for the illegal settlement.

Settlements like Migdalim surround Qusra today, isolating it from neighboring villages, putting them under constant surveillance, the theft of land creeping closer and closer every day.

Palestinian communities have become islands in a sea of bureaucratic violence, surrounded by sharks, never knowing if they’re safe from an incursion.

Qusra Mayor Abed Wadi recalled how there had once been olive trees and fig trees, weddings, children playing in the streets in the areas around the city. There were farmers who knew the surrounding hillsides not as disputed territory but as the land their families had cultivated for generations. There had been the ordinary pleasures of belonging somewhere, the unremarkable certainty that a person could leave home in the morning, work his fields, and return in the evening.

When our American delegation arrived in Qusra in September 2026, Wadi asked us to imagine visiting nearly twenty years earlier.

“If you had come to visit the town before 2008 and 2009, I would have explained and introduced Qusra in a different way than what I’m doing today, because the circumstances were totally different.”

He had prepared a different history for us now. It was a history of burned homes, destroyed olive groves, roads closed by the Israeli military, and relatives who had been killed.

Four of the young men, Hasan Abu Sorour, 16, Obayda Abu Sorour, 17, Moath Odeh, 21, and Musab Abu Reda, 25, were killed when a mob of Israeli settler terrorists began attacking family homes in Qusra on October 11, 2023.

As the funeral procession gathered the next day, Israeli settler terrorists open fired on the vehicles, killing two Palestinians.

The dead were Wadi’s brother, Ibrahim, 63, who was a senior official in the Palestinian Ministry of Finance, and his brother’s son, Ahmed, 26, who recently graduated law school and became engaged.

Wadi described the killings with the familiarity of someone who had repeated these details too many times, and with the grief of someone for whom repetition had made them no easier.

His account was also a geography lesson.

The destruction of Qusra is not measured only in the number of Palestinians killed, the homes attacked, or the olive trees destroyed. It is measured in the shrinking territory residents can safely occupy, the farmland they can no longer cultivate, the roads they can no longer travel, and the distances between communities that grow longer without the towns themselves moving an inch.

In Qusra, Palestinians are not simply losing land. They are being systematically separated from the means of living on it.

The process is sometimes described in the language of settlement expansion, as though the principal development were the construction of houses. The people we interviewed used considerably less forgiving language. They described armed Israeli terrorists, intimidation, dispossession, and the deliberate destruction of Palestinian life.

Their testimony, supported by years of human rights investigations and United Nations reporting, reveals a system in which violence does not merely accompany territorial expansion.

Violence is how the expansion happens.

The village remains on the map — for now. The world around it is being taken away.

A village measured in funerals

Wadi traced the transformation of Qusra to the years surrounding 2011, when armed Israelis attacked agricultural property and burned a mosque. He described thousands of olive trees damaged or destroyed, farming equipment confiscated, and residents increasingly prevented from reaching their fields.

“They confiscated farming equipment. They confiscated tractors, bulldozers. They prevented us from accessing or farming. We started going to our own olive fields and olive trees as strangers.”

International calls for accountability and justice went unanswered, and the violence continued to escalate.

For a farming community, land is not merely property. It is memory made physical. Families inherit trees planted by parents and grandparents, terraces maintained across generations, and an intimate understanding of soil, rainfall, seasonal rhythms, and harvests. The landscape holds knowledge that cannot be transferred to another place.

To be denied access to it is to lose something long before the property records change.

The killings came in succession. The mayor recounted deaths across multiple years, including the October 2023 attacks that devastated Qusra.

“It was the darkest day for Qusra. Because the settlers killed six young men on that same day together.”

A January 2024 investigation by The Washington Post reconstructed the attacks through witness accounts, video evidence, and other documentation. Its headline captured one of the investigation’s central findings: “Settlers killed a Palestinian teen. Israeli forces didn’t stop it.”

The investigation also reproduced a threat sent to Qusra residents before the attack. The message addressed Palestinians as animals and promised that revenge was coming.

What followed was not an unforeseeable eruption of anger. Residents had been threatened, armed attackers arrived, and Palestinian families were left to confront the consequences.

For the mayor, the losses were personal.

“One of whom was my brother, my own brother”

His brother Ibrahim, he explained, had eleven children. A younger family member, twenty-four years old and studying law, was engaged to be married.

It is easy for the scale of Palestinian suffering to become obscured by numbers. Here, each number had a family attached to it: eleven children, a wedding that would never take place, an empty place at the table.

The attacks continued.

On April 13, 2024, roughly 180 to 200 armed Israelis descended on Qusra, burning agricultural buildings, homes, vehicles, and municipal property. Wadi described livestock killed and residents injured.

“They burned houses that was already inhabited and houses that were under construction. They burned cars. They killed cows and sheep.”

Then he added:

“And one of the injured was one of my own children.”

In August 2026, weeks before our visit, armed Israelis again attacked homes in Qusra.

Reuters reported that dozens of masked attackers threw stones at a house while seven Palestinians were trapped inside. According to witnesses, Israeli forces subsequently fired tear gas into the home and detained its Palestinian occupants. The residents described being blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten.

The violence had moved from the agricultural hillsides to the thresholds of people’s homes.

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The small outpost and the enormous territory it controls

Driving toward Qusra, we passed Israeli settlements extending across the hilltops. Our Palestinian guide identified Shilo, Eli, and Ma’ale Levona, pointing toward agricultural land that Palestinian communities could no longer freely access.

Geography is not only about what occupies a place. It is also about who has been excluded from it.

Our guide pointed toward land associated with nearby Palestinian communities.

“They’ve taken over the land.”

Later, explaining the restrictions on movement, he told us:

“We’re only using this road because it’s the only road connecting between north and south.”

Palestinians could travel along the route, he explained, but entering the surrounding settlement areas was prohibited or dangerous.

The road had become a narrow corridor through a landscape over which others exercised control.

During our meeting in Qusra, a delegation member asked about the groups establishing themselves around Palestinian villages. Were these isolated attackers, or was there a larger structure behind the intimidation?

The municipal representative rejected the language of isolated misconduct.

“First of all, I consider the the settlers, who Netanyahu calls outlaws, rioters, we call them terrorists.”

The people burning homes, attacking farmers, and driving families from their land were not simply unruly neighbors. They were participating in a territorial campaign of terrorism and murder.

He described armed groups supplied with vehicles, weapons, and equipment, establishing themselves near Palestinian agricultural land and extending their influence through intimidation.

The result, he said, was the seizure of territory without the cost or visibility of a conventional military operation.

This is the fundamental geography of the Israeli outpost system.

A small number of structures can occupy a ridge while the armed men living there exercise control over an area many times larger. A Palestinian farmer may still possess a deed to the surrounding land, but that document offers little protection against someone waiting with a rifle.

Israeli organization Peace Now documented the proliferation of outposts in Area B in 2026, demonstrating that the expansion was no longer confined to land already under full Israeli civil administration. Its investigation described the establishment of outposts in territory formally assigned Palestinian civil authority.

The spatial consequences are enormous.

An outpost need not occupy an entire hillside to make the hillside inaccessible. It need only make the consequences of entering sufficiently frightening.

Once Palestinian farmers stop returning, the land becomes available for further encroachment.

What looks on a map like a small point of occupation becomes, in practice, a much larger zone of exclusion.

Land theft without paperwork

A Palestinian representative from Turmus Ayya, whom we interviewed during the same trip, offered perhaps the clearest explanation of how this process works.

He described olive groves that families still owned but could no longer safely enter.

“There’s no such thing as formally seized because they do not give you a notice. They do not tell you that this land has been seized.”

He called it:

“de facto seizure by the conduct of the settlers.”

There is no necessary announcement, no document handed to the owner, no single moment at which the land officially changes hands.

Instead, the farmer learns where he can no longer go.

“You learn it. You become to learn it that this is a dangerous area. I I should not go there.”

This is an especially effective form of coercive territorial control because it requires relatively little continuous enforcement. Once people have been attacked, or have watched their neighbors attacked, the threat becomes embedded in their understanding of the landscape.

The boundary is no longer simply a fence or checkpoint.

It is fear.

The farmer knows which road may be blocked, which grove may be watched, which hillside may conceal armed men. He adjusts his movements accordingly. His children learn the same geography.

Eventually, the prohibited territory becomes abandoned: a place everyone knows belongs to the village, and everyone knows they must avoid.

In geographic terms, legal ownership remains intact while practical access collapses.

The occupation creates two overlapping maps: one of property and another of power.

The second increasingly determines whether the first means anything.

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When the army arrives

Another representative from Turmus Ayya also described how armed Israelis exploit military authority to remove Palestinians from their own land.

He said attackers often approach in groups, with weapons displayed openly. They push or provoke Palestinian landowners while recording the confrontation on their phones.

“They start pushing me, kicking me, you know, shouldering me, pushing me with their hands and with their phones.”

Then, he explained:

“When I raise my hand, they call the IDF and claim that I attack them.”

Israeli soldiers then intervene against the Palestinian.

“So they come and detain me and arrest me and take me somewhere so I can disappear for a week or two.”

He described being detained for four hours with his wife and a news crew and said the crew was instructed to erase its footage before being released.

In October 2025, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed that armed Israelis, accompanied by Israeli forces, had prevented Palestinian farmers from reaching olive groves across several West Bank communities.

In nearby Kobar, residents were reportedly required to seek permission from an outpost guard to access agricultural land that had previously been freely accessible. Elsewhere, armed Israelis seized harvested olives while farmers were prevented from working their land.

This is a profound inversion of territorial authority.

The Palestinian farmer becomes the person required to explain why he is present.

The armed Israeli occupying or controlling the surrounding land becomes the person deciding whether he may stay.

In Qusra, residents described the same inversion at their homes. The August 2026 Reuters investigation documented allegations that Israeli forces detained Palestinians after armed Israelis attacked the house in which they had sought refuge.

A system that repeatedly exposes Palestinian landowners to violence, detention, and exclusion while enabling armed groups to maintain territorial control cannot be understood simply through the language of sporadic criminality.

Its effects are geographic, cumulative, and political.

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The olive harvest, interrupted

The most revealing measure of Qusra’s dispossession may be found not in a military map but in the village’s olive oil production.

A Qusra official reported that Qusra produced approximately 123 metric tons of olive oil in 2023, falling to 115 in 2024 and just 58 in 2025. For 2026, he anticipated only 16 to 20 metric tons.

Qusra’s disappearing olive harvest

If the projection holds, production will have fallen approximately 85% from its reported 2023 level.

Olive trees naturally experience fluctuations in productivity. Rainfall, temperature, disease, and alternate-bearing cycles influence harvests. These figures alone cannot isolate the effects of violence from environmental variability.

The interviews explain how farmers are being prevented from carrying out even the most basic agricultural work.

Another official from Turmus Ayya described three essential periods of access: preparing the soil in February, clearing vegetation around the trees in August, and harvesting the olives in October and November.

“But the biggest attacks occur during harvest itself, because there’s a time limit in in which you can harvest.”

The timing matters. Olives cannot simply wait indefinitely for armed men to leave. Harvesting too late reduces quality and can destroy a season’s economic value.

For farmers already operating with narrow margins, missing the harvest may mean losing an entire year’s income.

He described how his household had once produced enough olive oil to give away to relatives and friends. Now, he said:

“Right now, we buy our own. We have to go out and buy it.”

A family that once cultivated, pressed, consumed, and shared its own olive oil had become dependent on purchasing it.

This is what agricultural dispossession looks like inside a household.

Across the West Bank, the scale of the destruction is staggering.

OCHA documented 1,680 Israeli attacks resulting in casualties or property damage across more than 270 communities during 2025. During October and November alone, the agency recorded 178 attacks associated with the olive harvest across 88 communities. More than 6,000 trees and saplings were vandalized that year.

These figures do not capture every farmer who stayed home out of fear, every field that went untended, or every family that lost access to land without an incident recorded by international monitors.

The ecological consequences may also outlast the immediate violence. Agricultural terraces require maintenance. Soil needs protection against erosion. Trees require pruning and care. Traditional agricultural systems are sustained by repeated human labor across generations.

Denying farmers access to their land damages the relationship between people and the environment that makes cultivation possible.

An olive tree may survive the attack. The agricultural system surrounding it may not.

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The disappearance of Area B

Qusra’s representatives described an increasingly aggressive expansion of armed Israeli activity from Area C into Area B, where Palestinians are formally assigned civil administrative authority under the Oslo framework.

“ The violence and the intimidation have reached houses that fall in area B.”

Wadi described three families living in houses that had become effectively separated from the rest of the village.

Armed Israelis, he said, had established tents near their homes, obstructed access roads, and interfered with essential services.

“Electricity and water has been cut to some of the residents.”

The families included young children.

The municipality could no longer reliably reach them with supplies.

“It prevented us as a municipality and as a town from getting their needs of electricity, water, food, and supplies.”

This is more than land encroachment. It is the isolation of Palestinian families within their own community.

The distinction between Areas A, B, and C was intended to define different administrative arrangements within an already illegal occupation. Yet the expansion of armed outposts and intimidation across those boundaries reveals how little protection such divisions provide when control over movement and security is exercised unequally.

A family may live within an area designated for Palestinian civil administration and still be unable to receive water, electricity, or food from its own municipality.

The boundary exists in law. It is disregarded in practice.

The road that takes hours

The geography of dispossession extends beyond farmland.

Wadi described the closure of the village’s main entrance since October 2023. The journey to Nablus, once approximately twenty minutes, could now take hours.

“The passenger fare to get to Nablus used to be 8shekels. Now it’s 22 shekels.”

The cost of a journey had nearly tripled.

The physical distance, of course, had not changed.

This is the distinction between geometric distance and functional accessibility. Two communities may remain separated by only a few kilometers, yet checkpoints, roadblocks, military closures, and detours can make traveling between them exhausting, expensive, or impossible.

The consequences ripple through daily life.

A hospital becomes harder to reach. A farmer loses access to markets. A student spends hours traveling to school. Families become isolated from relatives living in neighboring villages.

Wadi explained that visiting nearby Turmus Ayya could require planning an entire day.

The roads still existed, but their purpose had been transformed.

Rather than connecting Palestinian communities, they had become instruments through which access could be restricted and controlled.

The geography of fear

During our trip, we also interviewed a Palestinian journalist who described being attacked while reporting near Nablus.

In one incident, she said armed Israelis fired live ammunition toward her and a colleague. In another, she was alone in a vehicle when armed men approached from a hillside.

She fled.

“The first thing I did is left the car, and I start running, run and run and start screaming to my colleague to hear me.”

She described how the terror continued long after the immediate danger had passed.

“You don’t discover it in the first days, but you have some trauma because you will dream”

Yet she refused to abandon her work.

“I will never give up.”

Her determination speaks to a broader reality: Palestinians are forced not only to survive the occupation but to document it, often at enormous personal risk.

On October 6, 2026, AFP photographer Jaafar Ashtiyeh was beaten by armed Israelis while covering violence against Palestinian olive farmers near Aqraba. His camera equipment was stolen, and he was hospitalized with injuries. The attack occurred near Israeli soldiers, who, according to witnesses, did not intervene.

The risks facing journalists are part of the same landscape of intimidation confronting farmers and residents.

The violence regulates who may enter a place, who may remain there, and who may record what happens.

Fear becomes a method of territorial governance.

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The architecture of dispossession

The processes unfolding around Qusra are consistent with decades of scholarship examining the spatial organization of Israeli occupation.

In Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (2006), geographer Oren Yiftachel analyzes how territorial policies and unequal access to land can reproduce political domination.

Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007) examines the ways settlements, roads, military installations, and planning systems reorganize Palestinian space.

Both provide important frameworks for understanding why dispossession cannot be measured solely by the number of buildings constructed or acres formally confiscated.

Territorial control is also exercised through mobility, infrastructure, access, and fear.

An armed outpost on a ridge can deny farmers access to surrounding valleys.

A closed gate can separate a village from its regional economy.

A blocked road can prevent a municipality from reaching families who live within its own boundaries.

An attack during olive harvest can destroy a year’s income without damaging a single property deed.

The result is a landscape in which Palestinians may retain formal claims to land while losing the practical ability to inhabit and use it.

The International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and addressed the legal consequences of settlement expansion, land appropriation, and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians. The Court’s opinion placed these territorial practices within the broader framework of international law.

The geography of Qusra reveals how such violations become part of ordinary life.

The occupation is experienced not only through soldiers and weapons, but through the impossibility of reaching a field, the expense of traveling to a nearby town, and the uncertainty of whether a family can safely sleep in its own home.

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What remains of Qusra

Toward the end of our meeting, Wadi returned to the contradiction between the language of democracy and human rights, and the conditions his community was enduring.

He had described murdered relatives, destroyed farms, families isolated from their neighbors, and children living under armed intimidation.

He was not asking us to imagine some distant political possibility.

He was describing what it takes for a village to remain alive.

A functioning community requires more than buildings and boundaries. It needs access to water, electricity, agricultural land, schools, hospitals, markets, and the surrounding landscape.

It needs the freedom to move.

It needs the ability to cultivate the soil and harvest what grows from it.

And it needs the reasonable expectation that its residents can return home without being attacked.

Qusra still possesses its name, its history, and its people. Its olive trees still stand on the hillsides. The agricultural terraces remain etched into the landscape.

But those physical remnants conceal the destruction taking place around them.

The land has not moved. The villages have not moved. The distances between them have not changed.

What has changed is who can cross those distances, who can cultivate the fields, and who can live without fear.

That is the geography of dispossession.

It is not only the theft of Palestinian land. It is the deliberate destruction of the relationships between people and place that make a homeland possible.

And in Qusra, the evidence is everywhere: in the groves left unharvested, the roads made impassable, the families trapped in their homes, and the names of the dead recited by a man who once would have welcomed visitors with stories about weddings and olive trees.

Qusra remains on the map for now, but increased violence and land seizures may one day lead to its destruction.

If you want to continue reading this series and/or support my work, please be sure to subscribe!

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Author Note:

I recently returned from the West Bank, Palestine where I was one of eight American delegates visiting the region. Our group included myself, my friend , former Congresswoman , her husband, and several others. I recently discussed some of what happened with . You can watch that interview here.

I will be publishing video, audio, and analysis from that trip over the coming weeks. Please be patient as I have over 60 GB of zipped video to review. To support my work, please subscribe below or donate here.

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If you missed Monday’s episode of The Barometer, I’ve got the highlights for you in this story, but you can view the full, unedited video here on Youtube. Please pardon the first moments as I was having issues with my mic that are quickly sorted out.

But FIRST! Lessons learned.

Monday at 7 am is too early of a start time, and my house is too busy to keep the promise that I’ll be here weekly on that day. I have more help on Tuesday morning and, as such, I’m moving the permanent air time of the show to Tuesdays from 8 am - 10 am.

So mark your calendars!

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Starting this Monday morning, I’m trying something new.

The Barometer goes LIVE from 7–10 AM Eastern every Monday.

That’s three hours of news, science, accountability, interviews, fact-checking, and the stories I think deserve more attention than they’re getting.

Think of it as a Monday-morning briefing for people who want to know not just what happened, but why it matters and what may be coming next.

And for our first show, we have a big one.

Newly released records are shedding more light on what New York City officials knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero after 9/11, when they knew it, and what information was withheld from the public.

We’ll dig into the documents, the science, the health consequences that continue more than 25 years later, and the question that still hasn’t gone away:

What is owed to the people who were told the air was safe?

But that’s only part of Monday’s show.

We’ll also be talking about the increasingly strong signals for a major El Niño, the aftermath of Hurri…

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I have an incredible opportunity — and very little time to make it happen.

I’ve been offered the chance to attend the United Nations Climate Change Study Programme in Geneva next month, an intensive, in-person program limited to just 30 participants from around the world, right before the COP31 conference held in Turkiye in November.

I need to raise $3,000 ASAP to pay the program fee, secure my place, and get my visa in time. My total goal is $8,000 to cover the program, airfare, lodging and travel expenses.

Click here to donate!

This opportunity feels like the culmination of nearly two decades of work.

I’ve studied hurricanes and climate change, contributed to National Climate Assessment research, modeled sea-level rise and future hurricane risks, worked on coastal resilience and with Indigenous communities confronting climate impacts, built public data systems, and spent years communicating science to the public.

Now I have the chance to take that experience directly into the UN climate system, meeting expert…

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I’ll be mutli-casting here, on YouTube, and on other social media websites. You can find all the ways to find and follow me here.

There will be opportunities for you to call in, ask questions, join the discussion and more!

So whether you’re getting ready for or on your way to work, enjoying your coffee, or just starting your day, I invite you all to join me on Mondays from 7 am - 10 am!

To keep up with all that’s going on, be sure to subscribe!

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There is something profoundly wrong happening in American politics right now, and perhaps the most disturbing part is how ordinary we have allowed it to become.

Then again, much of American politics has devolved into rage, hate, and ignorance. We’ve come to expect that from MAGA. But one of the types of bigotry even the Democrats are at best ignoring and at worst participating in is hatred and discrimination toward Muslims.

Rampant anti-Muslim sentiment has been normalized during this election cycle — not merely in the fever swamps of the internet, but among elected officials, political operatives, and institutions that would recoil, correctly, from employing the same language about almost any other religious minority.

Muslim candidates are expected to answer for Muslims they have never met. Their names, families, religious practices, and associations become legitimate subjects of suspicion.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has been subjected to a barrage of attacks, incl…

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Another hottest month. Another hottest ocean. Another heat wave that would have been extraordinarily unlikely without climate change. Another drought. Another wildfire season. Another chart whose line suddenly shoots above everything that came before it.

So many records are being broken so often, I often worry the public is becoming numb to the message and the urgency of confronting this crisis.

So let’s strip away the charts for a moment and talk about what actually matters.

The planet is extremely hot right now. The oceans are even more alarming. And one of the strongest El Niño events scientists have ever observed is developing on top of all of it.

That last part is important, because El Niño isn’t causing climate change.

Think of climate change as steadily raising the floor beneath us. El Niño is temporarily jumping on top of the roof.

And that combination could make the next year extraordinary.

Climate Central scientist Dr. Zachary Labe summed up the situa…

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While writing this piece, I received an alert that Donald Trump is dispatching agents to polling stations in Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing, and East Lansing today to “monitor” polling stations for “transparency.”

These four cities are not just democratic stronghold cities — they’re the cities in Michigan that are considered the most progressive and leftist cities in the state.

Hamtramck stands out on this list not because of its leftist politics, but rather because of its population — half of the city are legal immigrants, and Hamtramck has some of the largest populations of Bangladeshi-American and Yemeni-American citizens in the nation. The city is majority Muslim, and the targeting of Hamtramck (as opposed to other equally far-left cities, like Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti) makes it clear that Trump’s actions here are to intimidate Muslim and minority voters in a primary that is very much about the genocide in Israel.

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I first met Elijah Manley five years ago, while I was in the throes of my fight against DeSantis over COVID-19 and DeSantis’ attacks on my family.

When you’re fighting a tyrannical government, much of the rest of the world becomes background noise and few things break through the chorus of calamity.

Elijah cut through the noise like a hot knife.

Elijah possesses a rare combination of lived experience, intelligence, empathy, and determination, all guiding him to be one of the most passionate and authentic people I’ve ever met in politics.

Elijah paved his own path - from living in a car to successfully suing DeSantis over election delays in 2022.

Donate to Elijah Manley

Having the privilege to know Elijah as he’s broken barriers and continued his fight for justice has been one of most amazing parts of my own journey in Florida.

We need leaders who will fight back, leaders who know what’s at stake, and leaders who will live to see the policies they’ve enacted.

Leaders w…

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