Hundreds of thousands of small dams were built during the Industrial Revolution, but many are now completely obsolete and disused, doing nothing but sitting there, blocking fish passage, worsening flood risks, and keeping river water too warm with stagnant pools instead of free flow.

Now, record-high dam removals took place in both the United States and Europe in 2025! 100 dams were removed across America, reconnecting over 4,893 miles (over 7,800 kilometers) of river flow. Pennsylvania removed 14, Massachusetts 11, and Vermont 9. Highlights include major dam removals on the Winnebago River in Iowa, Brandywine River in Delaware, and Virgin River in Utah.

Across Europe, 602 river barriers including dams, weirs, and culverts were removed, reconnecting 2,324 miles (3,740 km) of rivers. Sweden removed 173, Finland 143, Spain 109, and the UK 35, while Iceland and North Macedonia removed dams for the first time in their history.

2025 also saw reintroduced Yangtze sturgeon spawning naturally on the Chishui River in China after over 300 dams on that tributary were removed in the early 2020s.

As the world accelerates into an electrotech future, removing the dam infrastructure of prior industrial ages is restoring biodiversity and building climate resilience!

Chile

The world’s only continental mainland-located colony of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) is found on the shores of the ironically named Useless Bay in the far-south Tierra del Fuego region of Chile. Penguins visited for centuries, but a breeding colony has only formed since 2010 thanks to the protection of local retired kindergarten teacher Cecilia Durán Gafo, who owns the land on these remote shores. She established and patrolled a private reserve, keeping out human harassers and training invasive minks and foxes to hunt elsewhere with meat scrap lures and deterrent dogs. Now, a team of 12 protectors is funded by ecotourism, and the colony has grown to nearly 200, with a record-high 23 surviving chicks in 2025. Great work!

India

In India, clean energy is powering a mega-nation’s rise like never before. India’s coal use is only 40% that of China’s at a similar state of development, and India is building solar farms at almost the same rate that China once built coal plants. Installed solar capacity has been rising by 40% per year, passing 150 gigawatts in March 2026.

The world’s-largest Khavda Solar Park is under construction in the Rann of Kutch, with a titanic 60 million panels (and a fleet of cleaning robots!) set to cover 280 square miles and produce 30 gigawatts (30,000 MW!) of energy once complete in 2029. Pumped hydro, battery storage, and transmission lines are beginning to be built out to efficiently store and deploy the sun’s bounty, and the government is incentivizing new domestic solar manufacturing. Clean electrification of the Indian subcontinent is a gigantic win for Earth, a transformative step towards a great Anthropocene! Superb.

Senegal

In 2021, scientists reintroduced 500 endangered African spurred tortoises (Centrochelys sulcata, the third-largest tortoise in the world) in Senegal, at the edge of the Sahara Desert, as part of an ongoing locally led tortoise conservation project. Now, satellite imagery reveals that the tortoises have transformed the landscape! Their deep burrows (reaching up to 15 meters long!) punched through the dried-out crust and let rainwater be stored in the soil, with green vegetation patches arising where the tortoises had dug. These ecosystem engineers directly helped reverse local desertification, a great new example of landscape-scale rewilding benefits. Awesome!

United Kingdom

In a historic first-ever wilding project, four European bison were introduced in Britain in 2022 at the Blean woodlands of Kent, and with several new calves born the herd has grown to nine by 2026. A second reintroduction site is now in the works for Cumbria, near the Scottish border. In just a few years, the Blean bison have shaped a more complex and ecologically rich woodland-pasture mosaic landscape, with their natural behaviors directly increasing biodiversity. Bark stripping created standing deadwood habitat for woodpeckers, bats, and fungi, dust bathing created sandy habitat for lizards, insects, and wildflowers, and thinning shrubs like rhododendron let more sunlight to the forest floor, allowing new seeds to germinate. Superb work!

Here’s my 2024 interview on this project!

The River Wye, which runs about 130 miles and forms much of the border between England and Wales, just became the first river in the UK to be covered by a rights of nature charter from source to sea, endorsed by all local councils it flows through! It confers rights to flow, biodiversity, representation and freedom from pollution, concurrent with ongoing activism and litigation against industrial chicken farm and sewage pollution in the river. Ecologist Dr. Louise Bodnor has been appointed “Voice of the Wye.” A milestone in the global rights of nature legal movement. Great work!

The Greenford Tube train station in West London used to flood when it rained heavily. Then, in 2023, beavers were reintroduced to the area, the first beavers in West London for over 400 years. They swiftly dammed a local creek, creating a pond and wetland that now holds excess rainwater like a sponge, as well as providing habitat for newly arrived species of birds, bats, and butterflies! Flooding was reduced so much that the city scrapped plans for an expensive reservoir and levee. A great example of rewilding as a human-benefiting climate adaptation solution! Spectacular work!

Philippines

The Philippines appears to be enjoying a Pakistan-style grassroots solar super-boom in 2026! The archipelago nation imported more Chinese solar panels (over 4,000 MW worth!) than any nation in the world (except the Netherlands) in just January through April, and much of Europe gets solar panels through Dutch ports so the Philippines is likely the leader in within-country installation. Rooftop solar in the country has nearly doubled in the last twelve months, and will likely surge much further. Excellent news!

Czechia

Scientists in Czechia have bred new drought-resistant varieties of the nation’s famous Saaz hops, the basis of many local lagers. It’s a highly culturally relevant climate adaptation, as Czechia drinks the most beer per capita of any nation in the world.

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea has announced plans for a historically gigantic marine protected area, with the new Western Manus MPA set to cover 200,000 km² of Coral Triangle seas (an area larger than Great Britain!) with a strict no-take zone! These waters are lush with life, home to thriving coral reefs, hammerhead and gulper sharks, Cuvier’s beaked whales, orcas, manta rays, dolphins, seabirds, sea turtles, the colossal yokozuna slickhead fish, and much more. Fascinatingly, the boundaries of the future MPA were determined in part thanks to scientists tracking endangered grey reef sharks. Formal legal gazetting will soon begin. A giant leap for ocean conservation!

Japan

The brown bear and Asiatic black bear populations in Japan have risen to the tens of thousands in recent decades. In 2025, ongoing rural depopulation plus a sparse acorn harvest and failed beechnut crop that year caused a spike in bear incursions into farms and even town streets, with tragic, deadly results. A record-high 13 humans were killed by bears in Japan in 2025, leading to a domestic military deployment and 14,000 bears culled in a twelve-month period. Now, demand for Monster Wolf robots is sky-high, as the custom-made solar-powered shriek-emitting animatronic scarecrows are now widely used in Japan to keep bears away from crops and human settlements. A changing array of disturbing sounds and sudden movements “keeps them scary,” preventing wildlife getting used to it. Manufacturer Ohta is now developing new wheeled and handheld models. Robots increasingly play a vital role in human/wildlife coexistence, a trend likely to surge in upcoming years. Fascinating!

United States

The disgusting, incompetent, and treasonous crime lords in power continue to shame the nation, but people across America keep working to build a brighter future!

Agrivoltaics continues to progress across the United States! Illinois is becoming a particular hotspot thanks to recently passed laws both forbidding nonsensical local-level solar bans and fast-tracking permitting for community solar and agrivoltaics. The classic solar partner of sheep grazing remains predominant (sheep because cattle are heavy enough to break panels, goats chew wires, and sheep do neither), but many trials to find good arrangements for row crops are underway. Excellent work!

A floating solar project was built on Twin Lake Reservoir in Ohio. It will doubly help water security, with its clean power running the water treatment plant for the city of Lima, Ohio while its panels help conserve water by reducing evaporation and light for algal blooms on the reservoir! Floating solar is finally taking off in America, with specialist developer D3 Energy now boasting over 20 U.S. floating solar projects.

In less than a year, startup Antora Energy deployed over 200 heat batteries totaling 5 gigawatt-hours at an ethanol1 biofuel plant in South Dakota, creating one of the largest decarbonized industrial heat projects in America! Compared to a “giant toaster,” Antora’s system runs electricity from local wind farms to warm big blocks of solid carbon to store heat, which can then boil water to pipe steam to factories, and it will help replace steam from a nearby coal plant’s boilers. They’ve also developed a new “thermal market energy pricing rider” incentivizing the heat batteries to draw power when there’s extra electrons on the grid, keeping prices competitive. Nice work!

Hyundai is reportedly planning to mass-produce the Atlas model of humanoid robots from startup Boston Dynamics at their EV factory in Georgia, and furthermore to test the robots’ ability to help make electric cars at the same factory. Humanoid robots have already been deployed at several different Chinese EV-makers’ factories for over a year; this is a good sign the U.S. could catch up soon! In other U.S. robot news, the Hugging Face platform debuted bipedal robot legs for $2,500, with open-source software, blueprints, and 3D-printable parts, to help spur decentralized innovation. Extraordinary technological times.

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Ember calculates that in April 2026, across all of human civilization wind plus solar generated more electricity than fossil gas for the first time ever! Wind and solar generated 22% of global electricity that month, compared to gas at 20%. Notably, this was the first full month of the Iran War and Hormuz fossil fuel crisis, which has starkly exposed the vulnerability of combustion and accelerated clean electrification. Solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet for 21 years now.

In 2025, 25% of all new cars sold were electric (fully or hybrid), with wide differences between national markets ranging from 97% in Norway to just 3% in Japan. Notably, China, the world’s largest car market, had 53% electric new sales. In 2026, EV sales have surged across much of the world in March and April as gas prices rose sharply.

On May 20, 2026, an overwhelming majority of the human nations of Earth voted for a non-binding United Nations resolution (sponsored by Vanuatu) endorsing the famed July 2025 International Court of Justice advisory opinion which found that a clean and sustainable environment is a human right, that governments had a legal obligation to protect a stable climate, and that poor countries harmed by climate change could be entitled to reparations. Notably, 141 nations voted in favor and passed the motion, 28 abstained, and 8 nations voted against it, including infamous petrostates like Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the current U.S. regime. This resolution has no new legal effect, but it’s a powerful symbolic reminder that most of the world is on board with rapid clean electrification and striving to stabilize Earth!

Australia

A project to return platypuses to the Hacking River in a park south of Sydney began with the release of 10 individuals in 2023. Another 3 platypuses were released in 2025, and now another 4 in May 2026. With 17 reintroduced, 1 found dead, and 4 new puggles born in the wild, the estimated population now stands at 20. Great work!

Australia is experiencing a historic home battery boom, with a whopping 400,000 units installed in just the last 10 months, totaling 11.2 gigawatt-hours of new distributed storage. As the “Solar Sharer” three hours of free electricity is set to debut soon, these Australian households are at the leading age of a dawning “free electricity” era thanks to the epic advances of the renewables revolution! Superb news.

In April 2026, conservationists released up to 100 captive-bred eastern barred bandicoots (Perameles gunnii) on Philip Island near Melbourne, Australia. The species was formerly extinct in the wild on the Australian mainland, with the last survivors collected in 1991 for a captive-breeding program that mixed genes with relatives from Tasmania to establish a population now at over 2,000. The little marsupials’ burrows improve soil health, seed dispersal, and water retention, boosting the whole landscape!

The great interwoven clonally reproducing bed of Poseidon’s ribbon weed seagrass (Posidonia australis) in Shark Bay just off Western Australia may be the largest single living organism1 on planet Earth. It’s over 4,500 years old and has grown to cover an area the size of Paris, France, and is a vital habitat site for dugongs, imperiled Indian Ocean manatee relatives. When a marine heat wave struck in 2011, about 25% of it, an area the size of Manhattan, was tragically lost in a world-record die-off.

Community volunteers have been working for years to help restore the seagrass. And now, local Aboriginal Australian-led startup Tidal Moon is working to help restore Shark Bay and build an income-generating, ecosystem-supporting, and carbon-sequestering sea cucumber farm in the seagrass beds. They’ll hand-plant seagrass in barren patches with divers, and transplant heat-resistant seagrass fragments from shallow waters into deeper waters to build climate resilience. Fascinating work!

Australia & Tuvalu

Australia signed the historic Falepili Union treaty with the low-lying and rising seas-imperiled atoll nation of Tuvalu in 2023. Over 65% of Tuvalu’s small population applied for Australian visas under the treaty terms in 2025. In 2026, the first cohort of 280 Tuvaluans have now been accepted and are making their way to Australia — the world’s first formally welcomed climate migrants. Simultaneously, an Australian-supported project is actively using dredging ships to push up seabed sand to form new elevated land, an effort which has already expanded Tuvalu’s landmass by 10%.

Ghana

Agricultural yields for several vital staple grains have recently increased sharply in the fast-developing West African nation of Ghana, rising from less than 1.5 tonnes per hectare in the early 2000s to over 2.5 tonnes per hectare today. A major driver was a 2017 publicly funded initiative to distribute improved seeds, fertilizers, and other vital inputs. Improving agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important tasks in the world to fight extreme poverty and build climate resilience, and this is a great blueprint on how it can be successfully done! Great news.

Türkiye

Türkiye, which will host the global COP31 climate talks in November 2026, is rapidly scaling up renewable energy. Wind and solar provided 22% of electricity generation in 2025, and there’s a rapid grid-scale battery build-out to match. The Kalyon Karapınar solar farm, Türkiye’s largest (so far!) was built on desertified ex-farmland, provides enough power for two million people and is known for its architecturally innovative central control building, a reflective prism with a courtyard oasis. Awesome work!

Argentina

In Patagonian waters off Argentina, researchers have discovered one of the largest deep-sea cold-water coral reefs ever found! It’s about 1,000 meters deep, made up mostly of the rare coral species Bathelia candida. Just one mound covers at least 0.4 km2, about the size of Vatican City, and there seem to be many more still unmapped!

Restoration efforts have already begun in some patches damaged by fishing trawlers, installing substrates and 3D-printed coral replicas to attract fish and coral larvae colonists with transplants of coral fragments set to start next year. Superb work!

Two new jaguar cubs, born in the wild to two different females, have recently been spotted in Argentina! A great sign that the rewilding project begun in 2019 is working.

China

Our World in Data reports and visualizes that China added 497 terawatt-hours of new electricity generation in 2025, almost all from solar and wind. That’s new generation in just one year roughly equivalent to the output of the entire permanent electricity grid of Germany. The scale of electrotech build-outs is becoming truly epoch-making.

In April 2026, the government of China formally enacted new environmental metrics and inspections for provincial governments, making reducing emissions and coal consumption official parts of how officials are “graded” on doing their jobs. That’s some CCP bureaucratic inside baseball, but also a powerful sign that China’s world-changing electrostate turn is becoming institutionalized and will further accelerate!

Bangladesh

A group of architects based in Dhaka are teaching villages across low-lying and fast-developing Bangladesh how to build Khudi Bari, a new design of flooding-resistant tiny houses. They use local wood and bamboo, are elevated off the ground, and can be easily and quickly dismantled and relocated if necessary. Great adaptation work!

As dozens of power plants are currently shut down in Bangladesh due to lack of imported fossil gas during the Hormuz crisis, fast-growing solar is helping keep the lights on, particularly in the northern Rangpur region. Future potential is vast!

United States

A lawless ultra-corrupt mafia regime continues to disgrace and befoul the halls of power, but people across America keep fighting to build a brighter future!

The nesting season for sea turtles on the beaches of Florida runs from March through October. In 2026, the season has had a record-breaking start! The state’s FWC conservation commission reported that as of April 30, 2026, the Sunshine State had 1,008 nests of leatherback sea turtles, up by 4% from May 2025, 3 nests of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, up from just 1 in May 2025, and a remarkable 1,450 nests of loggerhead sea turtles, up by 82% since May 2025. Green sea turtles nest later in the season, which is set to become a true banner year for chelonian restoration. Awesome!

Maryland, New Hampshire, and Connecticut just became the 5th, 6th, and 7th U.S. state to allow plug-in solar, passing measures allowing installation without overwhelming red tape! And the California State Senate has passed another such plug-in solar accessibility bill on a 35 to 1 vote! If (when???) it’s approved by the House and Governor, the largest state market in America will unleash clean energy for all. Absolutely excellent news! Here’s an action.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: May 20, 2026

Plug-in solar is progressing FAST, with major victories across America…

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Wind and especially solar are booming across ERCOT, the state grid of Texas, with solar’s share of generation rising from 4% in 2021 to 12% in 2025. The U.S. EIA reports that solar’s annual electricity generation (not capacity!) is set to overtake coal on ERCOT in 2026. Texas is now building more new solar than any other U.S. state, thanks in large part due to its “fair playing field” free-market permitting system for new electricity-generating projects that frees renewables to rise on their merits.

De-extinction startup Colossal has announced the hatching of 26 live baby chickens from their first-ever 3D-printed artificial eggs, a technological breakthrough that might someday enable the return of lost species like the giant moa whose chonky embryos could not survive in any living bird’s egg size. Extraordinary innovation work!

On March 25, 2026, a trail camera in the Minnesota woods near Voyageurs National Park recorded a female puma with three kittens, marking the first time in over 100 years that the species has bred in the North Star State! This may become a long-term breeding population, potentially boosting pumas’ nascent recolonization of the U.S. Midwest. Awesome news!

I’ll be doing a live chat with on Thursday May 28! Here’s the link.

I took the train from Mombasa to Nairobi on May 9, and spent the next few days writing up my articles on the incredible mangrove restoration work I’d gotten to visit with EarthLungs. On May 13th, I went on a dawn safari to Nairobi National Park. Ecotourism has become a rapidly growing economic driver for Kenya, and before leaving East Africa I very much wished to see a savanna ecosystem myself.

This is a protected area in extraordinary circumstances, an extent of wild megafauna-rich African savanna (home to over 100 mammal species and 400 resident and migratory bird species!) surrounded on three sides by the millions-strong human city of Nairobi1. Fences separate the park from the city to the north, east, and west. Only a patchwork of public and private lands on the south side of the park, across the Mbagathi River, provides open passage to the broader Athi-Kapiti Plains, allowing migration and thus preventing “islanding” and inbreeding — and this passage is becoming fragile as the city keeps growing. In 2025, the Kenyan government announced a new plan to restore this vital wildlife corridor connecting NNP to the Athi-Kapiti, including moving some public land to conservation management, acquiring private land for conservation, and building overpasses and underpasses to facilitate migration. There’s also a nascent biodiversity credits program paying Kenyan landowners near parks to keep portions of their land open and fence-free for wildlife passage.

On a symbolic level, this means that Nairobi National Park is practically a synecdoche for the Anthropocene all by itself. Giraffes and buffalo and hippopotamuses and great herds of impala antelope, a true iconic species-rich African savanna ecosystem, all roaming free at the edge of a capital city! The juxtaposition is stark: the runway of Kenya’s national airport is five kilometers from the park fence, and there are fully urban neighborhoods just hundreds of meters away from the fence boundary. Practically, this means that this park is astonishingly accessible on the ground. I booked a safari through TripAdvisor for just $35 per person, joining a group of four. They picked me up at 5:30 AM at an Airbnb in the city and drove to the park gate in just 30 minutes.

We’d hardly passed the gates before we saw a giraffe enjoying a morning browse at a tree, just a few hundred meters away from Nairobi apartment buildings.

The brown, almost russet, chisel-edged patches, the tufted little bony ossicones on the head, the dewy long-lashed eyes, the fragile-looking elegance of the great stretching legs and neck…it all added up to an extraordinary natural beauty.

I recalled that in 1414, the far-ranging treasure fleet exploration voyages of Admiral Zheng He famously brought back a live giraffe as tribute from Malindi (now part of Kenya) to the Ming Dynasty court of Emperor Yongle in Beijing, presenting it as the mythical qilin beast in real life. A giraffe really does look like a creature of legend sprung to life, far more improbable and marvelous-looking than a unicorn.

Giraffes were long thought to be one species, but in recent years genetic analysis has found that they are actually four species: the Northern giraffe, Southern giraffe, reticulated giraffe, and Maasai giraffe, comprising several recognized subspecies as well. Here in Nairobi National Park, we were seeing Maasai giraffes, Giraffa tippelskirchi. This species is categorized by the IUCN as Endangered, with a current population of about 32,000 individuals across Tanzania and southern Kenya. They saw an population decline of nearly 50% since the 1970s due to illegal hunting and habitat loss, but happily a 2025 report found Maasai giraffe numbers to now be nearly stable.

That’s about middling in terms of giraffe species population these days: as of 2025, the Northern giraffe had an estimated population decline of just 7,057 due to the wars in the Sahel, while the Southern giraffes have doubled to 68,837 thanks to robust conservation work in Namibia and Botswana.

As we moved on from the grazing giraffes, I looked behind our safari vehicle and caught a glimpse of a serval (Leptailurus serval) crossing the dirt track. The fierce little feline was a black-spotted golden streak almost glowing in the dawn's rosy light. In the middle distance, another giraffe was backlit by the rising sun.

We drove on, dawn moving into full tropical morning with jarring quickness. Our next new major wildlife encounter was deeper into the park, with several individuals from one of the famous “Big Five” species particularly prized as viewable wildlife.

The African buffalo (Syncerus caffer), a powerful herd ungulate, is sometimes also called the “Black Death” due to its reputation for deadly charges at human hunters (still a thing today). Its strikingly large horns are fused at their bases, forming a bone shield over the head like a mammalian pachycephalosaur. The IUCN ranks the species as “Near Threatened” with an estimated 400,000 individuals across large swathes of Africa, though the population is declining.

Interestingly, this species has already bounced back substantially from one near-death experience: the truly apocalyptic 1890s rinderpest epizootic. This multispecies pandemic killed most of the cattle in all of sub-Saharan Africa (with over 90% mortality rates in some areas!), plus an overwhelming majority of several wild hoofed mammal species including buffalo, causing socioeconomic chaos across the continent. Fortunately, rinderpest became the second-ever disease to be eradicated by humanity thanks to a concerted multi-decade global cattle vaccination effort. The last recorded case of rinderpest was in a buffalo in Kenya in 2001, this very species in this very country. The glorious defeat of rinderpest is not as well remembered as the first great victory, smallpox, perhaps because it’s a hoofed-mammal plague that doesn’t afflict humans, but it’s nonetheless an incredible triumph2 against senseless suffering.

After driving further into the park, past herds of graceful golden impala antelope and a few more browsing giraffes in the distance, we saw a rhinoceros.

It was a white rhinoceros, Ceratotherium simum. (The name isn’t actually a reference to color, but a corruption of the Afrikaans for “wide”). A group of two, one large and one small: a mother and child. White rhinos are the most populous of the five rhino species globally, with an estimated 15,752 individuals as of 2025. That’s up from as few as 100 in the early 1900s thanks to decades of dedicated conservation work, but down from around 21,000 in 2012 due to a deadly poaching surge in the mid-2010s.

The length of the mother's great keratinous horn was a testament to this park's security. In many protected areas (and even some zoos) conservationists have removed rhinos’ horns for their own safety in an effort to reduce the incentive for poachers to come and kill them.

After the mid-2010s poaching surge, Kenya has invested in better conservation security and its black and white rhino populations (over 2,000 individuals from both species combined) are now both steadily growing. In 2016, 1.35 tons of confiscated rhino horn were publicly burned at Nairobi National Park to symbolize Kenya's steadfast opposition to the illegal wildlife trade. (There had already been several public burnings of confiscated elephant tusk ivory in the park, starting in 1989). Kenya has lately installed highly effective FLIR thermal night-vision cameras in many protected areas to send rangers automated alerts of human and wildlife movements at night. In 2020 and 2022, zero rhinos were poached across all of Kenya.

The struggle to protect Africa’s rhinos goes on, but considerable progress has been made, and there are abundant reasons to be hopeful for further progress in the future. This mother was raising her baby in relative peace and safety, right next to a city of millions, despite the ridiculously high black-market value of the horns on her and her child’s heads. Coexistence is hard, but we know it can work.

A little while later, we came across some browsing giraffes again, this time even closer to the dirt track on which safari vehicles were permitted to drive.

You could even see the row of birds eating skin parasites off the giraffe’s neck. The indispensable iNaturalist citizen science app later informed me that they were red-billed oxpeckers, Buphagus erythrorhyncha, a savanna native known for eating blood-gorged ticks off impala, buffalo, giraffes, and rhinos.

Eventually, one of the giraffes got up from browsing and walked along the dirt track in front of our safari vehicle. We eventually pulled up right alongside it, and got some spectacular close-up pictures.

Soon after that thrilling proximity, we got a similar extra-close encounter with another African buffalo.

A lone male, its imposing bulk proclaimed a striking physicality as it lumbered down the dirt track, passing surprisingly near to the rear window of our vehicle and even following us for a few steps. Splashes and stains of gray-brown mud marked its fur and its great curving horns.

As the day wore on and full morning replaced the cool crepuscular period around dawn where many animals preferred to be active, our sightings of wildlife tapered off. After driving around the park for a while, we saw a group of ostriches in the distance, with a few more giraffes just visible on the skyline behind them.

Grey feathers marked a female ostrich; the males had black plumage and bright red skin on their necks. As we drew closer, the males moved away from the track, but the female didn’t seem as bothered by the proximity of our vehicle, and we got an excellent view.

The largest bird in the world, the sheer imposing size of her avian bulk reminded me that these were, technically, dinosaurs. When she raised her head, the park-traversing bridge segment of the Chinese-built Nairobi to Mombasa SGR railway was silhouetted behind her neck, another striking example of the unique situation of this periurban protected area.

The common ostrich, Struthio camelus, is ranked as “Least Concern” by the IUCN, with un-quantified but large and abundant populations spread across much of Africa plus a few ferals in Australia and numerous ostrich farms worldwide. The “sticking their heads in the sand” story is a myth, but their necks are so flexible (unlike, for example, giraffes) that they can lower them all the way to the ground, which can kind of make it look like they’ve buried their heads from a distance.

A little further along, we came across a pack of four black-backed jackals (Lupulella mesomelas), right on the dirt track and evidently unafraid of safari vehicles. A few had their pink tongues lolling out.

This species is widespread across the drylands of Southern and Eastern Africa. Like the coyote of North America, it’s a hardy canid opportunist, often persecuted by humans but still relatively common thanks to their resilience and flexibility.

As the safari wound to a close near midday, our guide drove us to a different ecosystem: a spreading pond with a fringe of marshy wetland, near the north end of the park. A very different species mix was present here than on the drier savanna I’d seen so far. Groups of Egyptian geese cackled at each other as they waddled along, and songbirds chirped in the bushes. A few distant crocodiles lounged on the muddy banks. Four plains zebras (Equus quagga) were socially grazing in the shade of a tree on the bank nearest our vehicle.

And in the middle of the pond was yet another example of iconic African megafauna. Pointing to the center of the waters, our guide called out “Hippos!”

At first, they were barely visible, with just tips of ears and nostrils poking above the surface like tiny island chains. Hardly distinguishable from the tips of sticks or even floating debris.

Then the guide drove us around to a different view of the wetland. Hippos deigned to surface a little more, and were clearly recognizable, with several majestic heads picked out in shades of gray and pink against the greenish water. A family of Hippopotamus amphibius, the notoriously aggressive semi-aquatic titans that the Greeks named “river horse.” They stay inactive and submerged in the water for most of the day, which helps avoid dehydration and overheating3, and come out at night for grazing. Today the IUCN ranks the common hippopotamus as Vulnerable, a step less imperiled than Endangered, with a roughly stable population of about 115,000 to 130,000 individuals in dozens of scattered habitat fragments across the African continent.

Soon after that, around midday, the safari came to a close. We left the park and within a shockingly short space of time were back in the fully urban developing-city environment of modern Nairobi. Just based on what I could see around me a mere minute away from the park gates, I’d never have guessed there was a savanna home to such magnificent creatures a stone’s throw away.

It was a fitting happenstance that the watery ecosystem patch was among the last spots I saw in the park, as it directly illustrates the fascinating interrelationships that sustain a species-rich savanna at the edge of a human city in the fractal pointillistic patchwork of variegated land covers and water-scapes that is Anthropocene Africa. The waterbody where I’d seen geese and zebras on the banks wasn’t a natural formation. It was the Hyena Reservoir, formed by the Hyena Dam, one of three permanent dams and seven smaller seasonal dams built within Nairobi National Park for ecosystem maintenance purposes. No hydropower was generated here: these are dams built entirely to benefit wildlife, providing living space for hippos and crocodiles and waterbirds plus drinking water sources for everything else. They weren’t just one-and-done interventions either: park authorities regularly check to see if they need de-silting. Water is life, and keeping more water around from the rainy season into the dry season meant that this park could keep being home to more of it.

This wildly abundant savanna ecosystem, an astounding spectacle of living viriditas, was in some ways under threat by humans, but was also being actively sustained and enriched by human landscape engineering. Nairobi National Park’s socioeconomic role in human society, as an income-generating jobs-supporting major tourist attraction for the city of Nairobi and the nation of Kenya, was actively protecting a multiplicity of its ecological roles, directly incentivizing humans to perform a beaver-like function of water management and habitat creation.

Artificial watering holes are becoming common in protected areas spanning dry forest and savanna ecosystems worldwide; a direct climate adaptation intervention to boost ecosystem resilience. I’ve previously interviewed a group installing solar-powered water pumps in India’s tiger reserves.

This is a paradigmatic example of the kind of “benevolent interventionist” mindset I strongly believe to be necessary for humanity to best help Earth’s biosphere to survive and thrive despite the many disruptions of climate change! I felt privileged to have seen it in action in Nairobi National Park, one of many landscapes in the modern world where wildlife and humans have negotiated a dynamic coexistence. Truly extraordinary work, and yet another case of under-reported deeply impactful hard-won environmental progress.

As electrotech adoption accelerates worldwide due to the manifold stupidities of the Iran War fossil fuel crisis, new data is underscoring how profound and far-reaching the global clean electrification shift has already become! Our World in Data has a great new visualization of Ember’s recent report that fossil fuel use for electricity declined worldwide in 2025, with clean energy meeting all new demand growth and then some!

And Bloomberg NEF notes that energy storage (mostly batteries) has crossed the “100 GW annually” barrier, with 112 GW (112,000 MW) installed worldwide in 2025. (54% of those installations were in China). The solar-to-storage ratio of annual global additions in gigawatts fell from 56 in 2016 (56 times as much solar as storage being built) to just 6 in 2025, as solar kept growing rapidly and storage grew even more rapidly from a lower base. The “solar power during the day, battery-stored solar at night” model is fully mature and increasingly dominating global energy systems. Humanity’s electrification just keeps accelerating!

“It only took four years for energy storage to increase annual additions to more than 100 GW from 10 GW, whereas it took roughly eight and 15 years for solar and wind, respectively. This record underscores growing market momentum and increased industry maturity.”

— Isshu Kikuma, BloombergNEF.

Colombia

The world’s first International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, in late April 2026. This unprecedented event brought together a “coalition of the willing” of 57 countries willing to commit to fully phase out coal, oil, and gas, with the conference thus avoiding fossil fuel lobby roadblocks and focusing on removing barriers to 100% clean electrification. The U.S., China, India, and major petrostates like Russia and Saudi Arabia did not attend, but the 57-nation coalition included the European Union, UK, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and many Latin American, African, and Pacific Island states, totaling over half of global GDP and one-third of global energy demand. Next year’s conference will take place in Tuvalu. Great work!

Singapore

The park-rich city-state of Singapore is home to a growing population of critically endangered Raffles’ banded langur monkeys (Presbytis formalis), one of Earth’s most imperiled primates. Numbers have doubled from around 40 in 2011 to 80 today, out of just an estimated 200-250 individuals worldwide. Local citizen science groups with hundreds of volunteers regularly survey and watch over the langur population, which has helped identify target corridor locations for a recently built overpass and rope bridges stretching over roads to link forest fragments. Another awesome example of wildlife-friendly modern cities becoming havens for biodiversity - Anthropocene arks!

Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, and is in a state of civil war between a military junta and jihadists. But it’s lately seen an incredible triumph for humanity: a globally supported rollout of new malaria vaccines starting in 2024 Now, two years later, early data indicates that malaria cases in the country fell 32% from 10.8 million in 2024 to around 7.3 million in 2025, and malaria deaths (mostly among young children) fell 44% from 3,523 to 1,979! This is a spectacular success, and it’s only just beginning! Malaria vaccines are an incredibly big win, both developing sub-Saharan Africa and protecting against climate change-spread diseases. Superb news!

[The malaria vaccine] has helped us save what little money we have. Just imagine what we used to spend on treatment every time malaria struck.”

— Rihanata Kouanda, Burkinabè mother.

Germany

Germany has completed the final lake in the epic Lusatian Lakeland ecosystem creation project, in which 23 former lignite coal mining pits over 14,000 hectares have been transformed with dedicated engineering into new lakes that serve as wildlife habitat, recreation areas, and water reservoirs ensuring nearby river flow in case of drought. This is now Europe’s largest artificial water landscape! The next step will be to connect it all with canals, forming a continuously navigable passage. This spectacular work isn’t quite rewilding, as there were no lakes here previously — it’s a particularly Anthropocene form of local terraforming, turning post-industrial wastelands into multipurpose benefactors for humanity and its biosphere. Great work!

Mongolia

The khulan (aka onager or Asiatic wild ass, Equus hemionus) has been absent from eastern Mongolia for over 65 years, blocked by the Trans-Mongolian Railway. In 2025, conservationists established a monitored fence-free safe passage point to allow khulan to cross the rails. Now, radio tracking and field observations confirm that several khulan groups are present east of the railway in 2026, expanding their habitat and boosting connectivity and resilience for the wide-ranging species. Excellent work!

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has achieved a new world record for ultra-energy-efficient desalination, getting fresh water from seawater with less energy use than ever before. Their new cutting-edge advanced reverse osmosis unit at the Yanbu desalination complex (partially solar powered!) has a capacity of 200,000 cubic meters of water per day, and record-low energy use of 1.55 kwH per cubic meter. Desalination is increasingly a core civilizational competency, slaking cities’ thirsts in a warming world. Great work!

South Africa

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have bounced back spectacularly since the dire decades of mass whaling, rising from less than 5,000 in the 1960s over 125,000 documented individuals today, above pre-whaling levels in many regions!

Now, the waters off South Africa have provided the best sign of recovery yet. In December 2025, photographers spotted a “super-group” of no less than 304 (three hundred and four!) humpback whales feeding together near Dassen Island — the biggest grouping of large whales ever recorded by humans. Notably, many of these whales had never been seen before, indicating that they are likely quite young (“10 tonne toddlers”) and that the population is growing fast. BRILLIANT news!

Angola

The Luau project has come online in eastern Angola, incorporating 31.85 MW of solar plus 75.26 MWh of battery storage! It will bring round-the-clock power to over 90,000 people with no need for fossil fuels. This is now Africa’s largest off-grid “minigrid” project, overtaking the Cazombo project completed last year also in Angola. Built with European investment, it’s located on the Lobito Corridor, a strategic railway project trying to bring Congolese and Zambian critical minerals to Atlantic ports. Clean electrification keeps on spreading in rural Africa! Great work.

Angola has designated a new 220 km² conservation area (twice the size of Paris!) protecting Afromontane forests around Mount Moco, its highest mountain. This is a particular lifeline for the rare Swierstra’s spurfowl bird, endemic to the region. Great!

Australia

The Victorian grassland earless dragon (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla) was believed extinct for 50 years, then rediscovered in 2023. Now, conservationists at Zoos Victoria have built a dedicated breeding center to safeguard the species’ future, already home to dozens of the little lizards and with a goal of growing the captive population to 500 individuals, about twice the estimated wild population. Excellent proactive work!

When scientists surveyed coral reefs at the Houtman Abrolhos islands in summer 2025, they expected to find mass bleaching and die-offs, as a deadly marine heat wave had ravaged corals across Western Australia earlier that year. They discovered a thriving island of resilience, with lab tests confirming that multiple species of local corals appear to have evolved extraordinarily strong heat tolerance! It’s unclear why (possibly something about the local algal symbionts?) but this could become a vital source of heat-tolerant corals to restore other reefs to survive the Anthropocene!

United States

The foul fossil-fueled flailing failures in power keep doing treasonous corruption and senseless sabotage, but people across America keep fighting to build a bright future!

Each year in the town of Bremen, Maine, artist Sue Schubel hand-paints about 500 photorealistic seabird decoys designed to lure species ranging from gannets to puffins to start new breeding colonies in suitable habitat. She’s been working on producing these surprisingly effective conservation tools for Audubon since 1996 and led the program since 2016. Audubon has sent decoys for 55 different seabird species to projects around the world, helping the resurgence of crested terns in China, masked boobies in Mauritius, and Atlantic puffins right nearby in Maine. AWESOME work!

Ribbed mussels are growing rapidly on the shores of Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, helping filter out pollutants, reduce erosion, and feed wildlife. Water quality in the region has improved substantially in recent years, likely kicking off this virtuous cycle!

Fervo Energy, America’s enhanced geothermal pioneer startup, just held a very successful initial public offering (IPO), raising $1.9 billion and valuing the company at $7.7 billion. They have several “clean drilling” projects actively under construction.

The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) had a good breeding season in winter 2026, with 23 new baby calves born off the U.S. East Coast — the most since 2009. There are now an estimated 384 individuals in the species.

Two companies and two county governments in Texas have signed off on a new partnership to build a gigantic new advanced-reverse-osmosis desalination plant on South Padre Island with a capacity of at least 50 million gallons per day. This could potentially “drought-proof” the entire Rio Grande Valley region by providing a consistent supply of drinkable water from the Gulf of Mexico! Excellent work.

U.S. startup Atoco has unveiled its prototype water harvester, using cutting-edge nanocrystalline metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to collect H2O molecules from thin air. (There’s abundant untapped water in the atmosphere even in arid climates). Atoco’s shipping container-sized model can produce up to 4,000 liters of pure water per day at a cost of cents per liter, and a smaller off-grid model can be deployed at need to communities lacking clean water. They plan to make and sell 200 in 2027, with more to come. Atoco’s founder, Palestinian-American chemist Dr. Omar Yaghi, won a 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on MOFs. Spectacular work!

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I wrote this entire newsletter on an informal “matatu” bus in Kenya!

On Friday May 8, my last day in the field with the awesome EarthLungs team, we visited their first and most developed planting site: Majaoni. I wasn't visiting a planting event today, but surveying the general day-to-day work at the most well-established EarthLungs mangrove nursery and the hub of the brand-new Beyond Trees projects, designed to provide a sustainable income flow to ensure that communities hired to replant mangroves didn’t turn to deforestation once the restoration work was done.

The Site Forester, manager of operations in this area, was named Eric, and the Tree Production Officer was named Juma. They gave me a guided tour of the Majaoni mangrove nursery - by far the largest that I had seen so far! Eric told me proudly that EarthLungs had restored over 200 hectares of mangrove forest at the Majaoni site alone since they began work here in 2023, with enviable 70% survivability among the seedlings they had planted here. It was now becoming a “mother site” sharing seedlings with other sites thanks to its bountiful nursery and many propagule-producing adult trees. When, say, extra Rhizophora mangroves were available at Majaoni and another site could plant them, they could harvest the seedlings or propagules from the nursery, pack them in nets for good aeration, and transport them by truck or boat.

Their standard protocol was to plant propagules directly in good-quality soils with regular tidal patterns, and cultivate seedlings for more difficult soil and/or hydrology conditions. Eric invited me to pluck several propagules straight from young Ceriops and Rhizophora trees in the nursery and prick them into the nearby mud (good soil here!) as we looked over the nursery beds of propagules and seeds growing into more robustly plantable seedlings.

A good mangrove nursery had to be in just the right spot, sheltered enough that the mangrove seedlings would stay in place but exposed enough that they'd still get watered every high tide, and with good topography and fast drainage so there was no stagnant water left behind. The main Majaoni nursery was surrounded by more mature mangrove trees, with a channel heading out towards the mid-distant Indian Ocean one end. After popping a propagule or seed into a tube of earth, it would normally stay under a shaded awning part of the nursery for three months, then get “hardened” in full UV-heavy tropical sun for one month before it was ready to replant. One corner was testing the effectiveness bamboo tubes to replace the (recyclable) black plastic they were currently using to contain and transport seedlings.

In addition to the Avicennia, Rhizophora, and Ceriops mangrove genera I had become familiar with over the last few days, this Majaoni nursery was also growing some I hadn’t seen before, like Xylocapas, Bruguiera, and Heriteria. Eric told me that unlike most mangroves, Heriteria was capable of thriving in entirely terrestrial conditions outside the intertidal zone, and they thus often planted it right on the shoreline.

Each species has different optimal conditions for their propagules or seeds to grow in. Ceriops and Rhizophora need organic matter-rich “black” clayey soil (the exact sort of mud I’d been finding it so challenging to walk through!), but hardy pioneer Avicennia can tolerate more sandy soils which would drive Ceriops seeds to dormancy. They’d trialed at Majaono some of the berm and trench work I’d seen at Mteza to help restore water flow in silt-degraded areas, and Rhizophora was particularly good for planting on those structures because they “pulled up” black soil to the surface where they grew.

In the lush Majaoni nursery, IIalso got my best view yet of several species among the charming inhabitants of the mangrove mud plain ecosystem.

There was a hermit crab, similar to those I’d often seen as a child on the beaches of New England, amid some Rhizophora seedlings, and also a mudskipper fish, a delightful little creature that I’d never seen in the wild before.

We were then joined by Nellie, the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Verification Officer, who explained her area of expertise. Basically, she was in charge of proving that the trees they planted were indeed planted and then checking up at intervals to see that they survived, and if not what killed them. As I’d previously seen at EarthLungs headquarters, she highlighted crab predation and drought as major mortality factors, with drought in particular getting worse due to climate change in the already hot and low-rainfall coastal regions of Kenya.

She gave me an in-depth explanation of her standard protocol. For temporary monitoring plots, the EarthLungs central office would send out some randomly generated GPS coordinate points within the polygon of the planting site. The first monitoring round occurred three months after the planting had taken place. Then the field staff would go to those coordinates, poke a stick in the center, measure a few meters’ radius around that with a rope, then tally all the planted seedlings there and note whether they were living or dead. Georeferenced photos served as proof of work, showing that at any random point within the work area trees really had been planted where they were supposed to have been planted. For permanent monitoring plots, they'd also keep measuring the same place at three-month interviews to establish a consistent time series, and collect extra data both on tree health (e.g. height, trunk diameter, number of branches and leaves) and potential mortality risks (e.g. local salinity levels).

After the nursery, I was passed between several EarthLungs experts to learn more about the multitude of new Beyond Trees projects being prototyped here. First, Eric showed me some early agroforestry efforts on the slope up from the nursery in the intertidal zone to the village on dry mainland.

They’d planted some bamboo plus several tree species seedlings here last year, including neem, mulberry, white oak, and the amazingly useful “miracle tree” moringa, along with lemon grass and vetiver grass. A belt of trees amidst farmland at the edge of mangrove swamps would help reduce erosion and prevent the “siltation” problem afflicting sites like Mteza.

As I watched the garden plots under the young trees, chickens acted as little rototillers scratching at the soil for bugs.

In the village itself, several different Beyond Trees project buildings clustered under the immense spread of an ancient gray-barked banyan tree.

There, I met Philip Msagha Nyange, a live-wire young innovator who was Head of Livestock for the EarthLungs Beyond Trees programs.

He first showed me their poultry house, in which chickens and guinea fowls pecked at grain and scratched at the ground together. The plan was an escalating gradual introduction to commercial poultry rearing, switching from the familiar local Kienyeji chickens to higher-yield breeds after two to five years of training, qnd then letting those higher-yield breeds disperse through the community's coops. Guinea fowl were also present; native to West Africa, they’re still a novelty in eastern Kenya. The goal was for each Beyond Trees community members to be able to produce two eggs per day for themselves, and also augment their income by selling extra eggs, chicks, and chickens.

There was also a nascent goat program, another potential enhanced income stream for post-restoration communities. Philip first showed me an empty new model goat house, just finished.

The bottom part of the walls was made from corrugated iron, as sold practically everywhere around Kenya. The top part of the walls was made from makonge, dried sisal planks, spaced to provide airflow. The roof was made from makuti, a thatch of coconut palm leaves. Goat waste fell through slats in the planks of the elevated floor. There were partitioned-off areas for birthing and suckling does, for kids, and for quarantine - any goat that might hurt or be hurt by the other goats. They'd feed by browsing the local outdoor vegetation, and there were plans to sow fast-growing perennial Napier grass as more forage fodder.

The old goat house currently had the goats in it. Just fourteen individuals right now, many of whom had just come back inside from grazing. The goal was for Beyond Trees communities to rear goats to get a cup of milk every day per person and sell the surplus. The Beyond Trees program would teach pest and disease control, nutrition, breeding, housing, management of land, and in general all production factors for higher-productivity goat-keeping. Much of the land around Mombasa wasn’t arable for cereal crops, but its vegetation could sustain dairy goats.

They'd brought in one buck and one doe goat from the renowned Somali Galla breed, known for being extra-large and drought tolerant with high yields of milk and meat, to improve the gene pool of the local community's goats. Philip said he was excited to see the “F1” first-generation hybrid.

Philip then showed me a smaller prototype side project that he was particularly passionate about: growing black soldier fly larvae in organic waste. A maggot ranch in a bucket. The larvae could be dried and milled to make animal feed, and their frass (droppings) could be used as fertilizer. He'd won a national Youth in Agriculture award for this “waste to wealth” project at the local Egerton University, and had high hopes of developing it further.

Unlike houseflies, which can spread numerous nasty diseases, black soldier flies don't spread pathogens that harm humans. Philip told me that he had won a scholarship that would empower him to soon go to Netherlands to study genetic engineering. (He'd previously tried to advance his agricultural studies in Nebraska, but was denied a visa in 2025). Philip's dream was to extract the bacterial-resistance genes for non-pathogenicity from black soldier flies and splice them into the genome of the faster-multiplying housefly, producing reasonably non-human-health-threatening maggots that would grow very fast to convert organic waste into fertilizer and animal feed at scale.

I was then handed on to Ben, the Majaoni site lead for apiculture (beekeeping). This was one of the more well-established parts of the new Beyond Trees program, already spreading from Majaoni to more sites in the fast-growing EarthLungs network. On several of our previous site visits to Vanga, Kuchi, and Mteza, the staff van trip I took had been joined by EarthLungs apiculturist Solomon bringing out additional hive boxes or some other beekeeping paraphernalia.

We walked a little ways away from the village center to come upon the apiary building. It literally buzzed with activity, filled with hive boxes that EarthLungs had acquired by encouraging the settlement of wild bees from the mangroves just downhill.

To acquire a new colony, they'd set out the empty hive box among the Avicennia trees and bait it with beeswax and aromatically attractive lemongrass oil. Sooner or later it would likely get colonized, and after a month of settling in the new hive would be carefully transported to the common apiary building for easy management and honey harvesting.

Interestingly, the local bees they were catching were not the now-globally-common European honeybee, but indigenous hives from the very strain widely known as the “African killer bee,” renowned for their aggressiveness and painful stings. I hadn’t quite put two and two together that those were the bees living wild in the local mangroves I’d been trekking around for the last few days.

For much of the year, these bees were foraging nectar directly from the flowers of the very mangrove trees that EarthLungs had lately restored. This was the rainy season (though I’d been lucky with long sunny stretches for parts of almost every day so far) and nectar-bearing vegetation to feed the bees was abundant. EarthLungs had already begun planting sunflowers near the apiary, which would be ready to sustain the bee colonies once the dry season hit and the mangroves would be pausing their production of nectar.

The overall business plan was to eventually build up to adding value with other apiculture products like beeswax, beeswax soap, beeswax candles, royal jelly, and bee venom. Currently, it was just honey. Their many hives could produce 7 to 8 kilos of refined mangrove nectar-flavored honey twice per year, and they'd only harvested honey from the Majaoni apiary twice so far: even the more established Beyond Trees project was still in its early stages. Ben had just packaged the second-ever harvest of EarthLungs mangrove honey last week. As wild-foraging bees, every harvest of honey had a slightly different color and taste depending on what exactly had been in flower at the time. Mangrove honey is a premium product, produced only at a few rare locations around the globe and apparently considered among the best nectar flavor profile inputs in the honey-tasting world, which helped substantially with the economic side of EarthLungs' plans to deploy apiculture widely as a Beyond Trees post-restoration community income stream. If all goes well, many communities employed for years on restoring mangrove ecosystems will receive beehives and tech support from EarthLungs to build a long-term reliable income stream not linked to deforestation.

Next, I went back to the village center and joined Mwaura, the EarthLungs employee in charge of the nascent mushroom-growing fungiculture wing of Beyond Trees. The first step in his process was assembling the growing substrate, starting with bales of wheat straw trucked in from nearby farms then running that straw through a chaff cutter and mixing in some wheat bran and cotton seed cake. Next the substrate was soaked for eight hours in a drum of water sprinkled with calcium carbonate.

Then the substrate was packed into plastic bags, which were then sterilized (don't want your edible mushroom farm to become just a mold farm!) by soaking in another drum with hydrogen peroxide and methylated spirits for forty-six hours.

Now, the bag of sterile wet substrate is finally ready to be inoculated with “mushroom spawn” from bottles of cultivated mycelium ready to spread to a new substrate and grow into fruiting fungal bodies.

After inoculation, the bags then spent twenty-one days sealed in an extra-warm incubation room, windowless and dark for optimal spread conditions. I got just a glimpse and a picture before the door was shut again.

Finally, they were moved to the shelves of the growing room, where a few slashes were cut in their plastic membrane to expose the contents to oxygen and encourage mushrooms to bloom out. The growing room was set up to maintain conditions of 98% humidity within a temperature range of 18 to 25 degrees Celsius.

This was all an absolutely brand-new months-old expansion for EarthLungs. In this whole process, they hadn’t actually gotten to the growing room stage yet! The growing room I saw was full of empty shelves. All the most advanced fungi they had were currently in the incubation room.

But they had already considered what would be necessary to roll out this fungiculture process at dozens, hundreds, or thousands of future successfully-completed mangrove restoration sites.

Notably, the just-built fungiculture growing building wasn't made out of concrete or even corrugated iron: it was old-school local vernacular architecture, with walls made from local mud sculpted into a framework of sisal planks. The roof was coconut palm thatch, an excellent heat shield and insulator for maintaining steady temperatures. Rows and rows of shelves made with local timber within were all currently empty, set to receive the first crop from the incubation room shortly.

I was impressed by the clear evidence that they'd really put a lot of thought into scalability and appropriateness for the context they were working in. EarthLungs is expanding fast from Kenya into Tanzania and now considerably poorer nation of Mozambique as well, and using readily available super-cheap materials like these would be critical in enabling possible grassroots exponential growth for this fungiculture model.

Even the choice of mushroom species to cultivate was an example of climate adaptation: they’d be growing white and grey oyster mushrooms because they could withstand the scorching heat of the Kenyan coast in the dry season much better than, say, button mushrooms.

Heading away from Majaoni that day, I was really, really impressed. All the stuff I’d seen today with all the moving pieces to grow better poultry, goats, bees, and mushrooms required a lot of specific process knowledge that wasn't present in most African villages. But it also used only materials that could reasonably be locally available even in quite impoverished reasons, and there's a millennia-long history1 of agricultural innovations spreading exponentially as knowledge is handed on by example and word of mouth. These Beyond Trees projects are prototypes, but it seems to me that they have excellent potential to scale up fast.

And improving agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa may sound niche, but it's one of the most important issues in the world right now, with immense impact on the potential future of humanity and its biosphere.

The ever-enlightening Dr. Hannah Ritchie has an excellent article on this. Cereal grain production in sub-Saharan Africa more than tripled since 1980, but that was mostly due to greatly expanding the footprint of land under cultivation, with very little improvement in yields per hectare. Over the same period in South Asia (e.g. India) cereal grain production more than doubled without any increase in land under cultivation, as yields rose rapidly due to improved crops and techniques. That’s a fundamental enabling factor for how it was possible for India to grow its tiger and rhino populations in recent decades while simulanteously raising living standards for its hundreds of millions of people. As Africa's population is on track to grow substantially in the coming decades (while much of the rest of the world has already passed “peak human”), agricultural productivity will probably be the number one factor in determining how much space is left for Africa's iconic wildlife. And as the climate grows more unpredictable, improving agricultural productivity is vital to ensure a secure food supply for Africa's people.

EarthLungs is beginning to create an extraordinary fully integrated system here, a replicable community-level model of ecosystem restoration seamlessly transitioning into increased agricultural productivity. Evaluate a site, maybe dig some channels, plant some mangroves, employ a community, restore an ecosystem in just a few years, boost climate resilience and biodiversity, set up a beekeeping or dairy goat or fungiculture project to help disincentivize deforestation, transfer some propagules or seedlings from your latest success story to a new site…repeat. As needed. Make the world a little better along a great number of axes, town by town and swamp by swamp.

EarthLungs is growing fast. They’ve now planted over 97 million trees, are well established in Kenya and Tanzania, and are expanding into Mozambique. I sincerely hope that their model, and the mangroves, and all the benefits they bring, just keep spreading faster and faster across the vibrant, fast-changing landscapes and seascapes of Anthropocene Africa.

On May 7, we visited the EarthLungs site of Mteza. This one was much closer to Mombasa, so we thankfully headed out at 7:30 AM instead of 6.

As we passed through a village down to the water's edge on an eroded red-earth track, my lucky streak of avoiding the rainy season's blasts on site visit days ran out. Rain came pouring down, in a brief but intense staccato of queued-up droplets.

We paused to wait it out under a corrugated-iron shelter.

As the rain began to die down, a man drove a large herd of cattle and goats along the shore.

We then crossed the channel, the only water transport needed on today's much shorter access journey. It was so shallow that we disembarked from a canoe. The mud was copious as usual, but not quite as difficult to move through as at the previous days' sites. We were greeted by Athuman, the EarthLungs Site Forester managing operations at Mteza, and Bakari, the Mteza site lead tree production officer.

Soon, we came to a field of recently planted mangroves that looked very different from the ones I had seen so far in the previous two site visit days.

The mangrove seedlings here - Avicennia marina, a pioneer species - were planted on long raised hillocks. They were arranged in rows, with crabs frolicking in the little trenches separating them. A much bigger and deeper trench ran crosswise along the ends of all the rows and smaller trenches. Earthen berms separated that trench from the sandy plain we were walking on.

It had taken about 100 people, hired from the local communities, a cumulative three solid weeks to dig these new mini-landforms. EarthLungs had arrived at the site in 2023, the first trenches and plantings were done in 2024, and more trenches and plantings were completed in 2025. There were now fifteen permanent EarthLungs staff at Mteza, and dozens more hired part-time as needed.

The trenches were needed at this Mteza site because of the particularly acute local siltation problem. When the brackish water rose at high tide, it was unusually full of sand and silt particles, and when it receded at low tide it left an infertile sandy layer atop the local clayey mud soils. The space where we were walking, to the left of the trenches dug throughout the planting area, was so covered in sand it almost looked like a beach. Sand buildup didn’t just reduce the fertility of the soils for new growth, it directly killed existing mangroves by blocking gas exchange when it covered their pneumatophore “breather” roots. (Not all mangroves have pneumatophores: particularly water-tolerant pioneers like Avicennia marina and Sonneratia alba do, while Ceriops tagal does not).

Here at Mteza, the siltation was building up, with increases in sand cover on a daily basis, and even more after rainfall. To some extent this is a natural process, but lately it’s become excessive and a threat to some mangrove ecosystems. Poor agricultural practices inland, like tilling land on steep hillsides without building terraces to reduce erosion, have made the silt problem gradually worse. Climate disruptions can bring the situation to a crisis point: the 1997-98 El Nino event had washed out a lot of extra silt to this area, which had killed a lot of mangrove trees.

The plan behind the trenches in this area was for the newly planted mangrove seedlings to grow in the hillocks richer clayey soil dug up to make the trenches, avoiding being smothered by the sand deposition. Over the years, the trenches would silt up with sand again, but that should take a while (the biggest one is two feet deep) by then the mangroves would be mature trees happily sequestering carbon and helping hold non-sand sediments and soil in place.

This wasn’t done haphazardly: there’s a lot to consider before any trenching activity or mangrove cultivation. Suleiman discussed with me the EarthLungs process when arriving at a new potential restoration site. Standard protocol was to do a vigorous site assessment. Talk to locals about which species were previously there, and the general biophysical history of the site. Check the biophysical factors, the still-existing species and where they were living. Measure the height and size of any trees present. Answer questions: what is the salinity in this area? What are the exact patterns of tidal influx and outflux in the local terrain? How does the water move, from where and to where?

This can be highly valuable. For example, Suleiman told me that during one pre-planting site inspection, EarthLungs had found wild Sonneratia alba, white mangrove, strangely high up and far from the water's edge, outside its usual “zonation.” Further inquiries revealed that this patch had indeed once been a regularly flooded zone, but the channel through which the high tide returned had been blocked by silt, exacerbated by fallen trees accumulating more silt and acting as dams.

Next, we went to view a “potless nursery” section, where propagules were grown into more mature transplantable seedlings for the rest of the Mteza site. You could just push the “embryo-like” propagules into the soil, separated by 15 centimeters, then let them grow and later a corer tool to pick them up as ready-to-transplant seedlings. This was a relatively new part of EarthLungs operations, now being trialed in an effort to reduce plastic use. Athuman told me that local children now come to catch the fish left by the last high tide in the trench around the potless nursery. Sometimes flamingos drop by to fish there as well.

Mteza was only the second reforestation site EarthLungs had done work at, starting in 2023. (We were to visit the first site, Majaoni, the next day). It was the first site where they’d partnered with the Veritree monitoring and verification platform. Athuman and Bakari proudly explained the process. The EarthLungs site manager and/or monitoring officer uploads data on how many trees they’ve planted, their locations, their species, and in the course of time their survival rate, using geotagged photos as proof. The on-site staff do Level 1 verification (yep, what I just wrote down is correct), off-site Earth Lungs staff do Level 2 verification (yep, what those guys put in the system is correct) and the Veritree platform does Level 3 verification (yep, this latest update from our EarthLungs looks correct) with a range of technological verification options including satellite imagery.

Standing in front of the potless nursery, I asked Athuman about his favorite part of working for EarthLungs. Without hesitation, he replied “The social impact.” When EarthLungs came to this Mteza site in 2023, much of the surrounding community was jobless, mainly spending their time fishing or cutting trees for charcoal. The income brought by EarthLungs’ regular “industry” of mangrove planting allowed parents to pay their kids’ school fees, and save money for the future. People learned about the importance of mangroves to the ecosystem. Tree cutting has spontaneously reduced, presumably thanks to both the education and the new income flow option.

EarthLungs even has an in-house “welfare” system for employees, where every month all staff have the option to contribute some small amount of money to a common fund. The contents of that fund can be loaned out to any EarthLungs staff that would like to borrow money at very low interest rates, helping empower people to make financial decisions without resorting to “loan sharks.”

And elsewhere on the Mteza site, too far to walk today, there were recently built beehives as part of the “Beyond Trees” program to ensure that communities employed by EarthLungs still had non-deforestation income-generating options once restoration work was complete. “Even in 30 or 50 years, the community will still benefit from this project.”

We then discussed the biophysical relationships, verging on symbiosis, between mangrove trees and the invertebrates of the mud flats. The omnipresent crabs have a nuanced effect: they will frequently eat mangrove propagules, and “crab predation” is one of the major causes of death for non-surviving trees planted, but they also are constantly digging tunnels in the mud to live, hide, and move in. These aerate and hydrate the soil, like a giant version of earthworms’ burrows, helping ensure good growing conditions. Overall, EarthLungs considers crabs to be a net benefit for mangroves, and notes high crab presence at potential future planting site as an encouraging sign for restoring ecosystem function. Shem told me that gastropods (snails) help mangroves by digesting fallen litter to give nutrients, and also help somewhat in aerating soils. No small mud animals present is a bad sign for future plantings.

After the potless nursery, we went to see the first trees planted on this site, back when EarthLungs had arrived in 2023. The fast-growing Rhizophora mucronata loop-root mangroves were already taller than me!

And finally, before we left, we checked out the non-potless nursery area, where the seedlings growing to planting size had been creatively arranged in a variety of charming shapes and patterns.

The names of a lot of people and organizations who supported the project. Slogans in Swahili and in English, including “Decent work for decent wages.”

A pair of lungs, for EarthLungs. The Veritree V logo. A Kenyan coat of arms. A pair of hands holding a stylized image of planet Earth centered on Africa.

As we headed back to the boat, I reflected that this is what climate resilience looks like on the ground. Lots of careful thought about silt and currents and historic ecosystems, and a hundred people moving some mud around, and then a few years later, beautiful young life-rich forests instead of a sandy waste. Local landscape-scale ecological interventions may not be as shiny and glamorous as electric high-speed rail or a electric medicine-carrying drone or all the other exponentially diversifying wonders of the electrotech revolution, but they also really matter, and can be deeply, viscerally important to the lives of the people (and wildlife) that live nearby. Awesome work!

On May 6, my second field day with EarthLungs, we left Mombasa early once again but this time went north instead of south. It was the same crew, myself plus William and Suleiman and Shem and a shifting cast of other EarthLungs staff on their way to and from places. Our destination today was the Kuchi site, near the bustling coastal town of Kilifi. Kuchi means “dark forest,” as it was historically known for the cool shade under its canopy of mature mangrove trees.

Our boat departed from the busy town dock of Kilifi instead of a lone mooring at the end of a trail like the day before.

As we sped through the brackish channels at low tide, we passed a small flotilla of fisherfolk casting nets from their canoes.

Then, we arrived at our disembarkation point. Amazingly, the Kuchi site was even muddier than the site near Vanga that I’d been to the day before. I wouldn’t have believed it possible as both areas consisted of entirely mud-covered intertidal mangrove habitat, but there it was: this Kuchi mud, perhaps due to subtle local mineralogical differences or something, was somehow both much stickier and much easier to sink into, practically to “stereotypical movie quicksand” levels in some spots.

Just walking around, so much mud accumulated on my boots that they doubled or tripled in mass, forming giant “clown feet” of mud continuously adding and sloughing off material.

Once we reached the site, a little ways inland (at low tide, that is) we were greated by Hassan, the Site Forester managing EarthLungs operations in Kuchi, and Titus. They were leading a dedicated local EarthLungs team of nine women and six men. There was a much smaller planting team at the Kuchi site than at yesterday’s site near Vanga. They hadn’t hired extra local community laborers for today's planting work, so there was just the permanent EarthLungs crew of 15 present.

Eyeing my comically stumbling progress with mud-caked feet on muddy terrain, Hassan said “We have a rule in Kuchi. If you step on a seedling, we throw you into the water!” He was joking, but the landscape around us gave a silent testimony as to why young trees were so particularly precious here.

Around me in Kuchi, there were lots and lots of young mangrove trees, but no old ones. The gray-brown mud was covered with shockingly extensive patches of scattered black ash. Twisted and gnarly flame-scorched stumps rose out of the ground at intervals. Blackened sticks and chips of wood littered the ground.

Wherever I turned, it was the same: a green but young landscape, with juvenile mangroves rising from a floor of stumps and ash and charred kindling. It gave the landscape a slightly eerie air, a vegetation version of babies playing in a field of bones.

Charcoal burning had already become a problem due to years of drought in the 2010s suppressing agricultural incomes. Parents needed money to send their kids for school, and converting mangroves into cheap fuel was a way to do that. When farming or fishing or local service jobs or working in the growing Kenyan tourist industry didn’t provide, there was always the tempting option to surreptitiously cut down a tree and slightly burn the bits. It carbonized the wood, removed water, and created a light, easy-to-burn, and highly polluting household fuel source. It was illegal to do this in Kuchi's mangroves, and Kenya has fairly strong environmental law enforcement, so for a while it was a recurring problem here but not an existential crisis.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Other sources of income were cut off. Desperation rose. People were suddenly willing to take bigger risks to support their family. Charcoal burning skyrocketed.

In just two years from 2020 through 2022, the forest of Kuchi was almost entirely razed. Denuded. Clear-cut tree by tree. Reduced to a wasteland. Became an ex-forest. The canopy of mature mangrove trees that had given it a name for dark cool shade on the sweltering coast was gone.

This was illegal to do in Kenya, so some of the last parts to be cut were thin strips along the water's edge, hiding the devastation from casual passing boats. A few of those still survive, plus the occasional lone older tree inland. But almost everything else was gone. Kuchi Forest, a patch of 247 hectares of mature mangrove ecosystem, had effectively ceased to exist.

This is an entirely quotidian tragedy, a story that recurs around the world every day. The UN reports that 40 million people worldwide earn income from charcoal production and that about half of all wood cut down from Earth's forests is converted to fuelwood or charcoal, a generally “informal” sector responsible for 2 to 7 percent of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions. Charcoal burning is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Africa. It’s also terrible for human health, producing lots of lung-ravaging pollutants like soot and particulate matter. Charcoal use for heat and cooking is a major contributor to the WHO-estimated 3 million premature deaths per year caused by household-level air pollution. It’s one big reason why clean cookstoves are so important - even fossil fuels like propane are a huge improvement in terms of both emissions and biodiversity impact compared to wild-harvested charcoal.

When EarthLungs arrived at the Kuchi site in 2023, they found a barren sun-baked mud plain covered in regularly salt-soaked ash, blackened trucks, and sea-smoothed burnt wood stubs.

But then they got to work fixing it.

The first EarthLungs mangrove planting at Kuchi was on May 5 2023, just three years almost to the day before I arrived and saw the result. Fascinatingly, they'd actively tried to hire the local individuals who had been most involved in the charcoal-burning and tree-cutting - a bold choice, but one which has been paying dividends. I met some of them here on the planting crew today, a man named Julius and a woman named Raphael Neve. Both of them said they much preferred this steady planting job to smoky, unpredictable, and illegal charcoal burning.

By offering a direct transition into paid restoration work for the people empirically most likely to resort to charcoal burning as a source of income, EarthLungs had converted a threat to the mangrove ecosystem into a support system, and incentivized day-by-day community education on the value of intact mangroves.

Hassan showed me one of the “mother trees,” a lone adult Avicennia marina mangrove that had survived the charcoal-burning COVID years and became a vital source of perfectly locally adapted seeds when EarthLungs started working on the scene.

This was one of several mangrove species EarthLungs was planting at Kuchi, and the differences in their life histories were already clearly visible after just three years.

Three different species of mangroves were being planted by EarthLungs at the Kuchi site. They grew at markedly different rates. Rhizophora mucronata, the loop-root mangrove, was the fastest-growing, the biggest among the seedlings planted at this site in 2023. The three-year-olds of this species were already well over my head! Avicennia marina, the grey mangrove, grew a bit slower. And Ceriops tagai, the spurred mangrove, grew much slower: their three-year-old seedlings were only up to my knee. Avicennia could grow in “Zonation 1,” deepest into the intertidal zone and most frequently inundated, all the way to “Zonation 3,” the least watery, while Ceriops preferred Zonation 3.

Once I’d explored the site for a while, I stopped taking pictures and joined the crew planting trees. William, one of the EarthLungs staff accompanying me on all of these different site visits, coordinated taking some pictures of me while my hands were busy.

I was slow and fumbling compared to the experienced planters, and too gentle and hesitant because I was afraid I was afraid I would hurt the little tree. The planting crew guided my hands and showed me that I needed to pack down the mud harder when I placed a seedling into a hole, smacking it down with my palm and even pinch-pressing it around the thin trunk to ensure that that it was firmy ensconced in the ground and wouldn't be washed away at the next high tide.

The dark forest of Kuchi is being reborn, thanks to the dedicated efforts of EarthLungs and the labor of the local community. In not that long, people and animals will shelter under a shady canopy of adult mangroves at this site once again.

The planting crew paused after a while for some group photos and a hand-clapping song and dance to welcome their guests, and then it was getting on for time to begin the hours-long boat and car journey back towards Mombasa.

On the way out, Hassan posed for a photo with a mangrove propagule fresh-dropped from the parent tree on the channel bank.

We also passed the fleet of snall-scale fishers again, still casting their nets from their hand-carved canoes. It looked so informal and “DIY” that my brain reflexively processed it as kids fishing for fun, but no, these were adults doing it for a living, providing a core protein source for their communities.

Someone in our boat called them over and bought some prawns. That appeared to be what they were catching today, filling buckets with glistening beige-ish shrimp relatives. These people's livelihoods were directly benefiting from the mangrove ecosystem; the prawns they were catching were so abundant here because they could safely grow and hide from predators in the dense three-dimensional labyrinth of mangrove roots at high tide. (And at low tide, these channels were too shallow for a lot of predator fish species). Some of the prawns they were catching today had very probably spent just the last high tide sheltering in the mazey roots of the human-tall young seedlings planted at Kuchi by an EarthLungs team composed largely of former charcoal burners.

Ecosystem conservation isn’t a one-time thing, it’s a never-ending process and an ongoing sociological relationship. Kuchi wasn’t doing that badly in the 2010s; it was a well-established forest with legal protections against development ornmass deforestation. But unexpected events like the global COVID-19 pandemic can blow up the status quo and cause waves of destruction, and then there’s new work that needs to be done to build the future that comes afterwards into a good one. Fortunately, more and more landscapes and seascapes around the world now have dedicated ecosystem restoration organizations like EarthLungs working to grow a good Anthropocene.

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At 6 AM on Tuesday May 5, the EarthLungs crew picked me up in the staff van and we set off for a day of mangrove reforestation. As with most road journeys I’ve seen in Africa, it was multipurpose: the EarthLungs staff van made many stops in the next few hours to pick up and drop off people along the way.

The four EarthLungs guys that I stayed with throughout the day were William, Suleiman, Solomon, and Shem (and I’m Sam - yes it was a bit confusing having four dudes with S_m names). We were ably chaffeured by driver Edwin. Notably, several EarthLungs staff (and a Kenya Forest Service officer who came along at one point) were wearing “15B” branded clothing, a reference to Kenya’s national goal of planting fifteen billion trees by 2032, which as of 2026 is reportedly on track! Ecosystem restoration has become a central part of the national political conversation.

We stopped for a breakfast of tea, beans and chapati in a local roadside diner. Kenya's small coastal towns looked very prosperous to my eye, with the consistent presence of power lines, paved roads, and ads for Internet data subscriptions bespeaking the nation's rapid development progress. Not just cashless but careless had become the monetary default in Kenya, with the revolutionary M-PESA online SMS-based banking and money transfer service now the norm for even the smallest of transactions. Lacking a Kenyan phone number, I was using paper Kenyan shillings from an ATM, but I was clearly behind the times.

Once we arrived at the closest drivable point to today's planting site, near the Kenya/Tanzania border between the towns of Majaoni and Vanga, that was only the beginning of the access journey. We’d timed our arrival for low tide, when the site was temporarily above water, but it was a long way out in the intertidal zone across muddy, impermanent terrain. The shallow channels were passable only by boat, and there were limited boats. When we arrived, the main planting workforce of village adults went first, and a second group including me would be ferried there about an hour later.

While we waited, the adorable village children (many of whose parents had just gone out to the planting site) pointed at me and chirped “Mzungu! Mzungu!” the Swahili word for “white person.” (Hilariously, it originally means something like “aimless wanderer.”) In their little high-pitched voices, it sounded like birdsong. When I pointed at myself and jokingly agreed “Yes, well spotted, I am a mzungu” they laughed uproariously.

I also fell into conversation with Jeremiah, a local public health worker. He was a Maasai man from the area around Kilimanjaro, now living on the coast and very interested in climate change issues.

We all then walked out through a mature mangrove forest (what majestically knobbly roots!) to the low-tide waterline, where the boat was now waiting for us, and set off for the planting site.

Many mangrove species can produce complex structures called “propagules” instead of or in addition to more recognizable seeds. Propagules are hardy specialized “embryo” pods that evolved to float long distances and are resistant to saltwater, a highly effective reproductive dispersal strategy that has helped mangroves spread across almost all of Earth's tropical tidal flats at one time or another. There were lots of them in the bottom of our boat, looking like a load of asparagus.

Spray misted my glasses as we navigated out through the maze of shallow brackish channels. It was a bright, warm, even hot day: the local rainy season so far had been almost ridiculously accommodating of my wish to go out and do stuff and take photos during the day, with regular rain showers but generally in the evening, night, or early morning.

Along the way, we passed several extraordinary small boats which each consisted of a small wooden canoe that looked painstakingly hand-carved plus a sail made from tattered plastic sacking.

Then, we arrived at our destination! Upon jumping off the boat, I almost immediately sank from my borrowed synthetic water boots up to my knees.

I’m quite familiar with mud. I’m from New England, where “mud” is basically a two-month season between winter and spring. The house I grew up in had a mudroom vestibule to clean shoes off before you went inside. Later, my undergrad academic advisor was an (awesome) wetlands ecologist, and I spent many happy class hours wading knee-high through vernal pools, salt marshes, or red maple swamps. In recent years, I’ve been smeared with various terraqueous gloops and colloids on multiple continents.

Nevertheless, the muddiness of this area was exceptionally striking. This was a permanency. A land of mud, not just a time of mud. A mudscape. Everything around me for miles was one vast intertidal zone! In temperate latitudes, this would have been just a vast barren expanse of sand, but here in the tropics even a permanently muddy inundated-at-high-tide zone can support a forest thanks to the innovative biology of dozens of species of mangrove trees.

The surface of the mud at low tide was dominated by crabs, multiple species from East African fiddler crabs with their outsized claw to more symmetrical Ocypode ghost crabs and many others I couldn’t even recognize. Their sideways movements weaved in and out of the regular pattern of “breather roots,” the gas-exchange biological snorkels poked up from adult mangroves as an adaptation to their semi-submerged daily rhythm of life.

The crabs skittered away and down into hidden holes as footsteps approach, but if you looked just a bit ahead you could see how incredibly many there were.

As we squelched on and moved away from the water's edge, we rejoined the planting crew.

There were about fifty people working here total, a plurality of them women from the local community hired as planters for the day. They wore a wide range of colorful clothing, including many intricate abstract prints plus one T-shirt that read Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Global culture is pervasive.

Interestingly, many seedlings being planted today had been brought to the site a while ago, packed into plastic cylindrical seedling cards with a bit of local mud, then left to stand in shrub-sheltered “beds” before getting the wrap shucked off and planted in the real ground where they could spread their roots. This got them some extra “protected” growing time without competitors or crabs, and also got them used to this exact area's soil, water, and light conditions. At this location, these pre-introduction beds of seedlings could even withstand tidal shifts.

I hadn’t heard of this technique before, but it struck me as a clever strategy. It reminded me of the “headstarting” halfway houses now common in wildlife reintroduction efforts, where animals were released into a contained, fenced-in bit of real forest or desert or whatever to help gradually acclimate them to the wild instead of going straight from captivity to wide-open landscapes.

The work spread over a wide area, interspersing more new young mangroves in bare patches between already-established juvenile trees. It followed a steady pattern with efficient division of labor. Some folks would dig holes, either with a metal core-sampler tool or a good old fashioned poking stick. Some would peel the plastic off the seedlings. Some would pick up all that for later recycling. And many would carefully place the denuded seedlings into their new holes and ensure that they were firmly ensconced in the surrounding mud so they wouldn’t be washed away by the next tide.

Some of the planters could carry buckets full of seedlings on their heads, and chose to do so even when there hands were free. I've never had good enough balance to pull that off even momentarily.

After I'd taken lots of pictures and videos, I put my phone away and joined in the trees planting myself. I was much slower and more fumbling than the experienced planters, but it was pretty simple, just pressing a seedling into one of the predug holes and tightly packing more mud around it so it stayed in place through tue next high tide.

The holes where the mud had been dug out for the seedling beds were still full of water at low tide. I saw tiny killifish in one of them.

By the end of the day, 12,500 young mangrove trees had been planted. 7,500 of them from propagules, the rest from seeds.

It’s quite challenging to come up with a more multifacetedly positive intervention for human and ecosystem well-being than restoring and protecting mangrove ecosystems.

Mangroves are defense-in-depth against physical climate disasters, acting as “shock absorbers” for extreme storms by providing wave attenuation and “living seawall” water buffering. If a cyclone swept up towards Mombasa from the south in the years to come, these mangroves in its way would materially reduce the physical force of wind and water hitting the city. Studies have found that storm surge can be reduced by as much as 50% just by hitting the topographically conplex structures of a mangrove forest, reducing the potential flooding area by hundreds or thousands of square kilometers. In addition to protecting against waves, their roots also hold soil and sediments together, reducing coastal erosion (and filtering pollutants from the land before they can reach, say, offshore coral reefs!). The mangroves of South Florida are estimated to have potentially prevented billions of dollars in damages from Hurricanes Irma and Ian.

They also serve as nurseries for biodiversity and local livelihoods. Little fish, both small species and the young of larger species, thrive in mangrove ecosystems because of all the spaces in the dense woodsy labyrinth where bigger fish can’t get in to eat them. A recent study calculated that mangrove ecosystems globally support an annual abundance of over 700 billion juvenile fish and invertebrates, and another study found that mangroves directly support over 4 million human small-scale fisherfolk worldwide.

And they’re absolutely freaking spectacular at carbon sequestration, even more so than on-land rainforests. They’re generally very fast-growing, tend to be denser, and they trap lots of extra organic matter and sediment in their great squiggly root networks. (It also helps that they’re really hard to burn down - at least naturally or by accident - due to the whole “intertidal zone” thing).

Mangrove reforestation work is Anthropocene-ready climate resilience in action, a great life-filled woody sponge of an ecosystem that acts multidimensional living shield and buttress and filter and nursery and carbon vault all at once to safeguard coastal regions of humanity and its biosphere.

It’s now super late, and I’m getting up early again for another EarthLungs field visit tomorrow! There are many different and unique projects to explore. That’s all for now!

I crossed Uganda and Kenya from Kampala to Mombasa in a marathon twenty-six hour travel session, taking a sixteen-hour overnight bus from Kampala to Nairobi and then a 5.5-hour train from Nairobi to Mombasa a few hours later. The next morning, I arrived by three-wheeled tuk-tuk at the Mombasa office of the EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation, in the Nyali neighborhood. The tuk-tuk sent up spray as it plowed through puddle patches covering stretches of the smaller roads, left over from the recent bout of flooding.

Kenya appears to me to be visibly much more developed than Uganda, closer to, say, Mexico in terms of physical infrastructure. In just my few glimpses of Kenyan cities so far, I saw1 consistently paved and marked roads, no open sewers, and much less ambient trash. The air felt markedly cleaner as well. This brief impression tracks the statistics: Kenya has had an incredible last three decades in terms of socioeconomic development! The share of the population with access to electricity rose from just 5% in 1997 to 76% in 2023!

Impressively, most of Kenya's electricity is renewable, with local company KenGen becoming a world leader in geothermal development along the hot rocks of the East African Rift Valley.

Healthcare rolled out across Kenya so fast that for a brief period, life expectancy in years grew almost as fast as actual years passed, rising from 51 in 2000 to 63.4 by 2015. In other words, on average, Kenya's population got 15 years older but less than two years closer to probable death over that period! That’s a genuinely amazing example of the kind of underreported progress that has transformed the lives of tens of millions of human beings in the 21st century so far.

Kenya's “hot streak” also extends to geopolitics. The country is now a full-on democracy, with a peaceful transfer of presidential power from Uhuru Kenyatta to William Ruto after the elections of 2022. Kenya also led a multinational UN-sponsored task force from 2024 to 2026 to attempt to restore some order in terribly violent and gang-ridden Haiti (for which President Biden rewarded them with formal U.S. Major Non-NATO Ally status), which as far as I know is the first time ever that an African nation has led a military combat operation in the Americas - and apparently conducted itself well enough that local Haitians attempted to blockade roads to prevent Kenyan troops from leaving! Definitely a nation on the rise.

When I arrived at the EarthLungs office in Mombasa, I was making my first in-person rendezvous with a long-time partner organization. They’re the leading reforestation NGO in Kenya and they’ve now started expanding into other East African countries as well, with over 92 million trees planted and pioneering use of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) technologies showing enviable survival rates!

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Monthly Dose of Climate Hope: A Conversation with Victor Mwanga on Tree-Growing in East Africa (Recording)

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8 months ago · 17 likes · Climate Action Now and Sam Matey-Coste

Readers may recall that I’ve previously interviewed EarthLungs founder and CEO Victor Mwanga on two occasions, once in 2024 and once at a live event in 2025.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: Interview with Victor Mwanga, CEO of EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation

Here’s an updated interview with Mr. Mwanga, from 2025…

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2 years ago · 41 likes · 5 comments

When people use the Climate Action Now app to quickly and easily take civic actions (like sending a customizable prewritten letter to state or federal legislators, as regularly featured in the Daily Dose posts I write for Climate Action Now when not traveling!), it's EarthLungs that plants the trees that those users earn for their actions. Money also goes to support EarthLungs’ work when people buy a Climate Action Now “Planet-Saving Subscription!”

When I arrived, Mr. Mwanga was busy in Nairobi, and director Bill Odongo greeted me heartily and introduced me to the team. The EarthLungs office bustled with activity, inhabited by fourteen folks today plus the new arrival of myself.

(There was also an adorable young cat, recently adopted by the office thanls to employee Noor Omar who found a lone kitten in the streets).

To me, the atmosphere felt like a startup or hackathon, with passionate young people working intently on laptops alongside each other on room-filling tables. That vibe could’ve been from anywhere in the world, the quintessential paradigm of 2020s productivity, but there were other aspects that were distinctly local. They kindly offered everyone unlimited and notably excellent hot sweet tea poured from huge silver canteens. (Kenya is famous for its black tea production, a major export industry). There was delicious ugali, the staple maize porridge, with lunch. And of course the long rack of various sizes of knee-high mud boots for fieldwork in coastal mangrove swamps was distinctive.

We arranged my site visit itinerary for the next few days, and then I asked some folks what they were working on just then.

Marriam was working with the Veritree dashboard, the monitoring, reporting, and verification software that tracks EarthLungs plantings. She was checking the files on a planting that took place on April 30, 2026, at a place called Kadzyuhoni, in which 18,000 Ceriops tagai seedlings (or rather “propagules,” since mangroves can grow just from chunks of living twig!) planted at a distance of 45-55 centimeters from each other. This species, the spurred or Indian mangroves, grows and sustains rich ecosystems around the shores of the Indian Ocean from Madagascar to the Philippines. Geotagged photos spread across the plot were proof of work.

Across the table, Daniel was curating and uploading field reports sent in via WhatsApp. Lots of different people would go to recently planted areas near them and check on seedling survival rates, send reports and coordinates by WhatsApp, Daniel would input that to Google Sheets which in turn was a linked data source to add another source of updates to the master Veritree platform. I noticed that the three most common causes of death for seedlings appeared to be “drought,” “trampling” and “crabs.”

I’d already missed the optimal time and tide for going out to a field side today, and this Monday was a day of planning and meetings back at base anyway. I'm now staying in a nearby Mombasa hotel which Bill kindly recommended and writing this in the evening on my phone (computer still borked). I meet the team at 6 AM tomorrow to go out to my first mangrove reforestation field site! I’m psyched.

Lake Victoria (also known as Lake Ukerewe, Nyanza, or Nnanubaale in local languages) is the largest lake in Africa, the largest tropical lake in the world, and the third-largest lake on Earth by surface area after Lake Superior and the Caspian Sea. The Nile flows north from this lake all the way to the Mediterranean. Its waters stretch over an area almost twice the size of Belgium, and millions of people are fed every day by its fisheries. Lake Victoria is also the site of one of the fastest known examples of evolution in planetary history, with hundreds of closely related species of haplochromine cichlids, descendants of ancient hybridization between Upper Nile and Congo cichlids, diversifying to fill a great multitude of different niches throughout the lake in just sixteen thousand years - the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

This fabled waterbody is also a poster child for rapid environmental change, with new major disturbances piling atop one another for the last hundred years. Overfishing was already an issue by the 1920s, which motivated the introduction of the fast-spreading Nile perch, which did indeed feed a lot of people but also became a new apex predator that drove many of the lake's cichlid species extinct by the 1980s. Nutrient runoff surged due to the multiplying farms and cities in its fast-growing watershed, resulting in runaway eutrophication as cyanobacteria covered the lake in algae blooms. Water hyacinth became a new fast-spreading invader in the 1990s.

But lately, even as climate change adds a new stressor, there are some encouraging signs of a new Anthropocene equilibrium forming. The hyacinth was brought somewhat under control by the 2000s due to the follow-up introduction of an pest weevil species. Fish farming has taken off, providing a more reliable source of food less dependant on wild ecosystems. And many of the surviving cichlids appear to be managing to rapidly evolve to survive in a murkier, algae-heavy, perch-filled lake. As described in the excellent conservation book The Rescue Effect, the “orangehead” cichlid (Haplochromis pyrrhocephalus) had lost 99.99% of its population by 1987, but has since bounced back immensely, with populations 18,000 times more abundant than their 1987 low point. The orangeheads have experienced phenotypic and evolutionary rescue, moving into shallower waters, eating different foods, and evolving a more streamlined body shape that may have helped them outswim Nile perch.

As I was in the neighborhood already, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see at least a tiny fraction of this lake in person.

On May 1, my last full day in Uganda, I went from Kampala to an interesting-looking spot I’d seen on Google Maps where a patch of tropical woodland hugged the coastline between the lake and the road linking Kampala with the coastal city of Entebbe. This little green stretch was called the Kitubulu forest, and it was where I first caught sight of Lake Victoria.

I walked off the road into a grassy lot in front of a hotel, where a team of local workers were digging channels in the wet red ground with metal shovels. Dragonflies scattered into the air as my feet disturbed their grassy perches, the black spots on their wings dancing like inkblots given life. Local waterbirds were diving into the lake for small fish. The iNaturalist app told me I was looking at brown wedge-headed hamerkopfs, white egrets, and small black-and-white lapwings.

Almost right away, I saw four marabou storks, the iconic scavenger birds that range across much of sub-Saharan Africa. They are so comically ugly that it wrapped all the way back around to cute, with warty black-and-red heads, giant imposing beaks, and impressive spreading wingspan.

Among the tallest flying birds in the world (right up there with Andean condors), they looked as if they came up to my waist. They showed little fear, allowing me to walk quite close before beginning to move away. Their craggy big-winged long-beaked forms reminded me of pterosaur depictions in paleoart.

A metal fence blocked further access into the coastal forest, so I scaled it and dropped down the other side into a denser, thicker, steamier woodland, a few dozen meters inland. (There wasn’t even barbed wire on the top; it was practically a ladder). It had rained that morning, and droplets of water sprinkled themselves over me as I pushed my way through the low-hanging branches crisscrossing the overgrown narrow dirt trail. Eventually, the trail widened again and I crossed paths with some local folks: one person cutting firewood, two shoveling up earth, a few passing on dirt bikes.

Soon, I started hearing chattering in the trees. I glanced up, and my eyes met those of a monkey.

The monkey looked at me. I looked at the monkey. We both looked at each other, for a still inquiring moment, and then my primate cousin moved on with a bold leap and a crash of branches.

A group of red-tailed monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius) were moving in the canopy above me! I hadn’t expected to see wild primates in such a city-surrounded forest fragment, but some adaptable species like these monkeys keep surprising us with how well they can learn to tolerate and thrive alongside even very dense human populations.

A man walked by carrying recently-cut firewood, just below the trees in which the monkeys were roosting. I kept walking along the path, and it eventually widened into a grassy knoll atop a small cliff overlooking the waters of the inlet.

Curlicues of green algae were clearly visible amidst the paler blue-gray waters. Once again, dragonflies with black wing-spots leapt up from the grass around each of my footfalls. A white egret stalked fish in the shallows. The buildings of the greater Kampala-Entebbe metro area spiked into the skyline.

On the far side of this little inlet, an array of fish farms were clearly visible, mesh pens enclosing a tiny subset of the great lake. Fish farming, mostly of Nile tilapia, has taken off rapidly across Lake Victoria in recent years, providing more reliable yields than wild fisheries, but still faces many challenges, from disease and pollution-caused die-offs to antibiotic-resistant bacteria spawned from efforts to counter those very fish diseases.

I kept walking, passing more folks about their business, and eventually came to the end of the forest. A plastic-ridden midden picked over by chickens and goats heralded the fringes of a human settlement, where men were working on long wooden boats amid houses built from scraps of metal sheeting.

Google Maps informed me that this was the Gudda fish landing site. At first glance it looked impoverished, and it was by developed-world standards, but paying attention to small details helped adjust my perspective. There were new power lines bringing electricity to these homes. Metal roofs would protect from rain, unlike branches or bamboo. The goats were fat, and had lots of cute babies. As I moved on, I passed a modern clinic within walking distance. Life looked to be getting better for the local families.

Striking black-and-white pied kingfishers abounded, perching on the power lines en masse like starlings or crows. A lone marabou stork stood sentry atop one wooden pole overlooking the lake.

After traversing the fishing shantytown, I walked inland into the more prosperous-looking built-up areas of Entebbe proper, where I then spent the afternoon writing in a local café run as a social enterprise by a Ugandan gorilla conservation group.

Lake Victoria neared its metaphorical limits many times in the last century, and its future is still risky and uncertain. But when I visited one tiny edge of its physical limits, I found it to be still full of life, hardy “weed” species thriving alongside steadily developing human settlements. As East Africa keeps growing, I hope that the communities around this great lake eventually lead an environmental and water quality renaissance of the sort that has restored flourishing freshwater ecosystems to so much of the developed world.

As I write these words, it’s May 2, and I’ll shortly be getting on an overnight bus from Kampala to Nairobi, Kenya, on my way to meet up with the amazing EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation in the mangrove swamps near Mombasa. My computer seems to have developed some arcane hard drive problem, so I’m writing this (and likely many future articles) on my phone alone. I’m psyched for what comes next - on we go!

On the eventful day of Thursday April 30th, as we were returning from a visit to the amazing Soleil Power battery factory at Kirolo, Brendan suggested that I drop by Uganda’s National Science Week. I hadn’t even heard of it, but apparently a big-deal government-sponsored expo to promote investment in Ugandan science and technology was underway at the Kololo Independence parade grounds in central Kampala1. I walked in (startling a marabou stork on the way), requested a free visitor pass, and looked around.

It was the first day of the event, and a lot of booths were still being set up. I was among relatively few early visitors. The booths, each sponsored by a Ugandan company, NGO, or academic project, were organized by field.

In the center was a big seating hall, oriented towards a projector screen on which several Ugandan officials were giving speeches. There was a food-and-agriculture area. There was a services area. There was a biomedical area, with the centerpiece item being a project by the renowned Uganda Virus Research Institute to develop their own “flexible and scalable” RNA vaccines for COVID variants.

There was an “industry” section with some projects on water filtration, minerals, and a nascent local university effort to use plastic waste in road construction.

There was also an “electric mobility” section at the far end of the expo, with a diverse medley of brands in attendance Some of them I already knew. There was a whole fleet of the Spiro electric motorbikes I’d been seeing regularly this whole trip, and a booth from Soleil Power featuring batteries made at the local factory I had toured just that morning!

There were also two cars from Great Wall Motors, a Chinese EV brand that had recently signed a deal with a local Uganda distributor.

Most novel to me were the two all-electric buses from Kiira Motors, a pioneer local Ugandan auto manufacturer. They were importing high-end electric motors and tires, and building the rest of the bus themselves locally, steadily gaining skills for the local workforce. It was an automotive equivalent of Soleil importing raw battery cells and assembling them into modules and packs. Moving up the value chain: a classic development strategy, and one increasingly relevant to the electrotech revolution as nations around the world seek to emulate the solar and battery colossus that is China.

I’d read about Kiira before: they had recently grabbed headlines by driving one of their 100% electric bus models on a 13,000-kilometer six-country 30-day tour across Africa from Kampala to Cape Town! That bus wasn’t on display today, but two other models were, a twelve-meter model meant to go between different cities and a ten-meter within-the-same-city model.

On the way out, a heavily armed Ugandan soldier on gate guard duty asked to take a selfie with me2. I did so with quickness.

A few hours later, I met up with Metkel Abraham, CEO and co-founder of Aptech Africa. I’d previously interviewed him in 2025, but this was the first time we’d met in person. After catching up personally (he showed me an awesome video of how he’d taken his kids whitewater rafting in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park!), I pulled out my notebook and we did an impromptu follow-up interview to update on the progress Aptech has made in the past year.

When we’d last spoken, Aptech had completed solar and microgrid projects in 31 countries. Metkel told me that Aptech was now operating in over 40 countries, and recently launched new solar installation projects in Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Yemen, Afghanistan, the West Bank, and Armenia. They now have 180 permanent employees at their head office in Kampala alone (where they have a new dedicated office building under construction), and 500 total employees spread across all their different projects.

The day we met, Metkel had just gotten back from South Sudan, which happens to be the country where much of Aptech’s inventory got looted when a civil war broke out 2013 and where they flew in a lithium battery to a school over the active war in 2016. This time, he had gone there representing Aptech’s bid to fulfill a World Bank project to solarize 52 more hospitals in South Sudan. Such a transformative reliable electricity source that would allow them to preserve life-saving vaccines in a cold chain.

To me, Uganda was an exotic adventure. To Metkel, it was a normal home base, the place he came back to from the actual rough parts of the world. (In case it’s not clear, I really admire this guy)!

One of Aptech’s big already-begun projects was a recent commitment to build clean electricity-generating solar arrays for 240 hospitals, 240 schools, and 80 administrative buildings, as well as installing 10,200 solar streetlights, across the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and until recently most war-torn countries in the world. The sheer human scale and weight of this endeavor astounded me. According to Our World in Data, only 18% of the C.A.R. population had access to even bare-bones basic electricity in 2023 (the national grid is practically nonexistent) so most or all of these hospitals and schools are likely to be getting electricity for the first time. Just for a thought experiment, assume a (very conservative) number of 1,000 local people whose lives are improved in some way by getting a hospital with consistent electricity in their neighborhood, whether it’s receiving a vaccine that they can now safely stock or getting treated with equipment that can now be powered. That would be 240,000 lives changed by the hospital component of this project alone, and the CAR only has between 5 and 6 million people total!

If you look at a map of the remaining countries in the world where most people still don’t have access to electricity, and then look on Aptech’s website to see where they’re building new projects, it’s practically the same list of countries. From Sierra Leone to Somalia, from Guinea (the one in West Africa) to Papua New Guinea (the one in Melanesia), they’re operating in frontier markets, literally empowering some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Aptech and companies like it are bringing some of the greatest fruits of modern civilization, the basic package of medical care and clean water and farm irrigation that brings child mortality down from 50% to 5%, to the last bloody frontiers of the world, where people with recent memories of fleeing warlords can gain a little stability and safety in their life thanks to power literally coming down to them from our parent Star. The places that a fossil-fueled global economy didn’t uplift for long impoverished decades are finally getting a foundation on which to strive for broad-based prosperity and human well-being thanks to the solar and battery innovations of the global Electrotech Revolution. There’s not all that many things more awesome, noble, inspiring or generally good happening in the world right now.

And now right when that growth is hitting an exponential curve, a stupid war is causing a fossil fuel shortage that’s likely to start biting down harder soon. I noticed a gas station in Kampala last night that had run out of fuel to sell. The case for electrotech adoption was already spectacular and getting better every day, and now it’s been accelerated even more. Just since I’ve been in Africa, my favorite think tank Ember has released some new jaw-dropping reports showing even more evidence that fossil fuels are entering structural decline worldwide, with fossil electricity generation decreasing in China, India, and the OECD in 2025. Worldwide, clean energy met all new electricity demand and then some last year!

The solarpunk future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. I look forward to seeing human civilization become a cleaner, greener, healthier, and more resilient hyperobject as electrification brings incredible new advances in the years to come!

On the morning of Thursday April 30th, I woke up early, checked out of my Airbnb at 6:30 AM, and crossed Kampala by taxi to a make rendezvous at 7 AM. I was meeting Brendan Cronin, CEO of Soleil Power, a new battery-focused “sister company” of leading frontier-market solar installer Aptech Africa. Both are now part of the new umbrella company Massawa Group, a fast-growing superstar of African electrotech deployment. I had interviewed Aptech CEO and co-founder Metkel Abraham over a video call in 2025, and I’d been absolutely fascinated by their bold and heroic endeavors to bring a clean first-ever electricity source to some of the most dangerous places in the world.

After several days of coordination efforts over WhatsApp, I received a kind offer for Brendan to drive me from Kampala to the new Soleil Power battery factory in Kirolo, a village about an hour to the north. He picked me up at the rendezvous point in a black Toyota Land Cruiser, and we drove off. Brendan had some fascinating stories to tell. An American originally from Maryland who’d worked as a Caribbean boat captain before getting a mechanical engineering degree, he’d been working in equatorial African infrastructure and development for the last twenty years in various roles across Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, South Sudan (just before the civil war) and now Uganda. Along the way, as we traversed an uneven medley of recently paved stretches breaking up eroded red dirt roads, Brendan told me how he’d come to this position. Soleil Power itself was a brand new company, a battery startup budding off Aptech’s highly successful solar-focused business. It had started existence around 2021, and Brendan had been hired as CEO in 2022, excited for a new challenge. Soleil started with prototypes in a tiny workshop in Kampala, and after years of work moved to a new purpose-built factory space on a plot of land they’d bought near Kirolo, with operations there beginning in July 2025. This new factory was the first multi-use1 lithium-ion battery assembly plant anywhere between South Africa and the Sahara.

We eventually arrived at a big gray building on a rural unpaved lot. A solar-powered borehole well on the left of the building provided drinking water. This was the new factory — we were here! It was already in operation but also still under construction itself, with new machinery and component materials arriving in shipping containers after traversing the Indian Ocean to the Kenyan port of Mombasa and then crossing overland on a truck to drop stuff off right at the doorstep. As Brendan and I walked in, I could see a production line taking up one wall on the left and a range of other tech spaced out across the other walls. It was just past 8 AM, and the employees had arrived just before we did. Brendan told me that what they had now amounted to a three fully functional semi-automated early production lines, one for metal casing fabrication and two co-located battery production lines assembling modules from both cylindrical cells and prismatic cells. As workers gained skills and experience in battery-making, they were planning to soon upgrade to fully automated assembly lines to speed up the process. EV motorbike companies had been the first to hire people to work on batteries in Uganda, but Soleil was the first to build diversified lithium-ion and lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries for home, business, and EV uses, and they were regularly hiring and training workers with no previous battery experience — growing the whole sector.

It was a hot, sunny day outside when we arrived, though there had been rain earlier and it would rain more later in the day. Nevertheless, the space inside the factory was cool and shady, notably more comfortable than outside despite all the machines running. Soleil now had 20 full-time employees, and was still receiving substantial logistical support from the much larger Aptech. The working language was English, a common ground spoken by skilled Ugandan employees from a range of cultural backgrounds. Brendan told me that they hired many of their employees from Kampala universities based on electrical experience, but were also hiring some part-time “casual” workers from the local Kirolo village community with the goal of moving them to full-time as they gained skills and practice.

Like everyone else in Africa, Soleil imports part of their electrotech from China. But where they differ is that they only important the most basic sub-component of a battery: pallets of raw cells, single small cylinders or rectangles that chemically store energy. At the factory, they assemble these basic cells into functional productions, adding grounding, insulation, and connector cables around multiple cells connected as a module, then arranging them into full multi-module battery packs of different form factors and power output levels suitable for different use cases.

Brendan gave me the tour of the major pieces of equipment. There was a CNC laser cutter, a compressor-fed press-fit machine, and a drill press, all for machining the custom metal superstructure of the battery packs that held the modules in alignment.

There was a powder coating booth for painting those metal parts. There was a huge inventory zone, full of pallets of battery cells and soon-to-be-assembled new equipment.

There was a machine for stamping terminal sections on the positive and negative ends of the raw lithium-ion and lithium-iron-phosphate battery cells.

And interspersed with the semi-manual production line, there were a wide range of different battery testing devices for different stages of the process. Brendan proudly described their high process control to ensure consistent quality. This Soleil factory had already won several international certifications, including ISO 9001:2015 for quality management, ISO 14001:2015 for environmental management, and ISO 45001:2018 for occupational health and safety.

Checking the functionality of battery cells before using them, checking the functionality of cells assembled into modules, and checking the functionality of full ready-to-go battery packs.

As of right now, after less than a year, Brendan told me that this Soleil factory has a production capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 battery pack units, with unit size ranging from 1 to 5 kilowatt-hours of storage. (These battery pack units themselves can be grouped together in racks of sixteen or thirty-two for larger-scale uses, like for a business instead of a home).

In addition to the wide range of machines forming part of the battery pack assembly process, there were also electric motorcycles parked in several different corners around the factory. All were bikes from Ugandan e-mobility company Zembo, part of the Soleil company fleet as well as factory testing platforms for using Soleil batteries in two-wheeler EVs.

After two years of R&D and testing, Soleil has begun to commercially supply battery packs Zembo for use in their bikes and swap stations. Soleil’s marketing efforts have only just begun, but they’ve already built relationships with early customers.

Another relevance of motorcycles to this factory was as a source of new input components. Brendan told me that in addition to importing fresh battery cells from China to assemble into packs, they were also “triaging” battery cells from the fast-growing African e-mobility sector (all those electric motorbikes). Some of the time, some cells from bikes that had reached the end of their useful life could still be reconfigured for a second “upcycled” life in a battery pack. Testing was especially important to sort these ones out. Soleil was a pioneer in this emerging circular economy of energy storage, the very first company to go to market in Uganda with a second-life lithium-iron-phosphate battery product like this.

The tour finished, Brendan moved on to the many pressing tasks that did not include providing live narration and guiding for a curious Substacker. After checking that it wouldn’t be too much of a disturbance, I walked backwards up the production line, starting with the most finished product, and conducted a brief interview with each Soleil employee I met along the way.

First, I talked with Berna, an outgoing woman analyzing data at a computer console. She was the Assembly Lead, a role of great responsibility as the manager essentially running this entire factory day-to-day when more senior personnel were elsewhere. She’d been working with Soleil since April 2025, and was a big fan of renewable energy and particularly battery storage.

Reagan was using a TFT (thin-film transistor) diagnostic machine to triple-check the performance of a nearly complete battery pack. He’d been working here for two years, since 2024, and said it was because he liked renewable energy.

Daniel was one of the part-time workers hired from the local community, and was working on adding connector cables to a mostly-finished battery pack. He told me precisely that he’d been with Soleil for seven months and sixteen days, and that it was a good job.

Next up was Mukisa, another “casual” local part-timer, attaching metal casings to the newly cabled and insulated battery cell packs. He said he was on his third month and loved working with this team.

At the center of the production line, Shakirah was adding cables and insulation to a battery recently assembled from a network of cells. She’d been working with Soleil for one year, and told me she’d come to learn more and grow her career.

At the step just before, Lilian was adding nickel strips to help hold the battery cells in place as a pack. She said she’d been working here for one year, and took the job because it was “unique.”

Hafiswa was doing quality control, checking QC data for battery cells on a laptop just in front of the testing machines. She told me she’d been working here for nine months, and that she’d joined because she was really interested in batteries and wanted to learn more.

Then, at the far end of the production line, I met Abu and Marvin, working together on two laptops open to SolidWorks CAD and Excel respectively. They were designing a new prototype battery pack form factor, working towards a more “stackable” model that could click together without needing an external frame. Both were veteran Soleil employees: Abu had worked here for two years and Marvin one and a half. They both also said that they were working here because they loved clean energy.

Beyond them, the only other folks working in the factory when I was there were Vincent and Isa, both at work on the other side of the building from the main production line powder-coating metal battery pack parts with black paint. Vincent said he loved working here, and had done so for two years.

After that, as Brendan moved around the factory discussing various details, I walked around by myself, took some more pictures, and eventually fell into conversation with Berna again. I asked her if she wanted to share any message with future readers from around the world, and she said “Love from Africa!” We talked more, and she animatedly shared her ambitions for renewable energy to help power Uganda’s development. “Green energy is happening globally and to us here in Africa. Battery storage is really important because it works across all electricity sources. We can fast-forward through the process you guys [foreigners, Westerners] went through. We can learn from what you guys did. We can have a future where we’re more like you guys, a mixed country where people from all over feel they can come.” I was humbled and inspired by her enthusiasm.

As we stepped outside to head back to Kampala, Brendan outlined potential future plans for Soleil Power. Once they filled up this factory with new semi-automated assembly lines, they could build another one right next to it on the same multi-acre plot of land. They could pave the access road and parking lot, although that would be so expensive it wasn’t a near-term priority. They might even build on-site employee housing. There was lots of room to grow, and a strategy to make it happen. In Uganda, Soleil wasn’t planning to compete on price with the multiple straight-outta-China all-imports solar installers (including current local sales volume leader Felicity Solar, which I’d seen in the Kampala streets), but they could compete on being customizable, flexible, extra-reliable, and more reactive to the needs of the local market. A battery from China might linger in various importers’ inventories for a year by the time it’s sold at local distributors in Uganda, and it would be made to one of a set few preexisting models designed and built in China for global markets which might or might not match what people in Uganda wanted just then. Soleil could build small batches of uniquely formatted battery packs with custom sizes, shapes, and power outputs to meet individual local business clients’ specific needs as they arose. After ten years of scaling up their factory and their home, business, and EV batteries, Soleil could be building grid-scale battery packs the size of a shipping container. I don’t know what the future holds for this company, but I do know that they’ll be doing their darnedest to seize the day and help build a cleaner future for Africa.

It was a pleasure and privilege to visit this brand-new outpost of the electrotech revolution, with a dedicated team building an unprecedented center of clean industry in Africa. Spectacular work!

On my first morning in Kampala, still tired from the overnight bus ride but waiting until the afternoon for my Airbnb check-in time to open, I visited the Ugandan National Mosque to pass some time visiting the striking monument. I got a bit of a jump scare when I noticed that it was also named the Gaddafi National Mosque, as the infamous Libyan dictator had paid for much of its construction in the early 2000s.

Nevertheless, it was a beautiful building. (From the Pyramids on, how many other megalomaniacs have funded the dreams of architects?) The largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa, with intricate wooden carvings in the roof, metal chandeliers from Egypt, and spreading carpet from Turkey. It was Monday, so the big common prayer space generally filled on Fridays was empty. My tour guide recited a verse from a giant wall-mounted Qur’an in mellifluous Arabic, then showed me his Makerere University student portal on his smartphone in English. He was just a few years younger than me, and said that he wanted to both advance in the Islamic clergy and get a degree in hospitality and tourism. Tour guiding here was practice for both ambitions.

When we climbed over two hundred steps to the top of the minaret, he pointed out Anglican, Catholic, and Hindu places of worship scattered around the 360-degree panorama of Kampala city, as well as other landmarks like government buildings and Makerere University itself. He was visibly proud of Kampala’s ecumenical cosmopolitanism, with so many different faiths living in the city. The name Kampala literally translates as “Impala Hill,” and today’s metro area of millions was once a woodsy hunting preserve for historic Bugandan kings known for the eponymous antelopes.

Uganda is an intensely pluralistic country, situated on Lake Victoria (aka Nyanza) at a crossroads of cultures with links to both the Swahili-speaking coast and the Nilotic world to the north. The official national language is English, a classic “neutral ground” post-imperial decision by a newly independent country to avoid prioritizing one of several competing regional or tribal languages, and I was impressed by how many people in the street spoke at least a few words. I noticed more public religiosity than in Rwanda, taking a range of different forms from a noticeable minority of woman wearing hijabs to churches chanting gospel music the occasional born-again Christian guy on the street randomly asking me if I knew Jesus.

As I explored the capital city over parts of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I saw many campaign posters for incumbent dictator Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda since 1986 and recently “won” a seventh term in January 2026, as well as some for the National Unity Platform, a leading opposition movement often brutally repressed. I also saw posters advertising an athletic event for the birthday of Museveni’s son, the infamous General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, known for his drunkenness, violence, and random Twitter threats to conquer Sudan, Kenya, Italy, and Türkiye. Succession questions loom large in modern Ugandan politics.

Overall, Kampala was a lot scruffier and rougher around the edges than Kigali. Traffic stops and lights are few and far between, while traffic jams are common. Open sewers are more common, sidewalks less. At one point, a traffic cop shook down my Uber driver for a bribe (for which I later reimbursed the poor driver). The streets of Kampala have far fewer EVs and EV bikes than Kigali, and the air is dirtier to a substantial degree, giving me a slight cough and headache that I recall all too well from Mumbai and Mexico City. The city is thronged with boda-boda motorcycle taxis, always trying to sell their services to a traveler on foot, and just eyeballing it I would estimate the Kampala motorbike fleet to be perhaps 10-20% electric compared to Kigali’s roughly 50%-75%. I began to appreciate even more the description of Rwanda as Africa’s Singapore.

Still, it’s a matter of degree. I personally felt safe all the time, and many people went out of their way to be kind and helpful to me. And there are many visible signs of electrification and new development at work in Kampala. I noticed common Spiro and Mocoo brands of electric bikes (though not the Rwandan brand Ampersand, ubiquitous in Kigali) and several battery-swap stations. Uganda is also a country “on the way up,” just at a slightly different point on a notional socioeconomic development spectrum.

As I worked to finalize a meeting with a local electrotech company, I noticed a Mocoo battery swap station right near my Airbnb, just next door to a quite decent local pizza place. I successfully requested permission to take some photos and stick around to watch their next client.

It was just a little hole-in-the-wall one-room place full of battery packs charging and charged, with one guy named Hakim running the show. He told me that he generally got over 100 clients a day, that people paid via an app, and that it was “a good job” to work here. Mocoo is a Uganda-based subsidiary brand of a Chinese company, seemingly trying to become a “national champion” similar to Ampersand in Rwanda.

Soon, a motorcyclist came up for a battery swap, with a package strapped to the back of his red Mocoo machine. Between them, he and Hakim very quickly unlatched the old battery from its quadrangular socket at the heart of the bike and hauled it back into the shop.

Then the client paid on the app and carried out a new battery, completing the installation process himself in a matter of seconds. He just connected up one wire and slotted the new battery into the socket, where it neatly clicked into place. It looked about as difficult as plugging in my laptop.

Next, I went to the Kasubi Tombs, an African necropolis home to four deceased Bugandan kings. The situation of modern Buganda (from which the name “Uganda” comes) is quite an interesting one, and bears a little explanation It’s a subnational kingdom within a (nominal) republic, covering the central capital region of Uganda and representing about 16% of the population. This arrangement seems paradoxical, but is actually quite common across modern Africa. In Western terms, Buganda within Uganda is as if there was a Kingdom of England within a British Republic, in which the House of Windsor had a ceremonial and cultural role across most but not all of the country, with Wales and Scotland part of the same country but not the same monarchy. There are four other major traditional kingdoms still extant in other parts of Uganda: the Ankole, Bunyoro, Torro, and Omokama. Abroad, Nigeria, South Africa, and Burkina Faso are among the many other African states with powerful and influential subnational kingdoms. The Bugandan king has few formal legal powers now, but still resides in the capital and retains immense cultural and spiritual influence, rather like the Pope in Italy.

After buying a ticket to visit, I was assigned a tour guide named Ronnie, who passionately explained the ancient and ongoing complexities of Bugandan culture. The great central building held the tombs of the four most recent ex-kings of Buganda, and the surrounding huts had historically been home to wives and concubines of these kings. The original had tragically burned down in 2010, and we were looking at a replica constructed with funding support from the Japanese government.

Ronnie told me that dead kings of Buganda were first shrouded and entombed in the “public” area in front of the great bark-cloth curtain, then their graves were pushed behind the curtain where it was forbidden to look, metaphysically entering the spirit world. (He also made sure to point out that unlike Egyptian pharaohs, Bugandan kings of old were never buried with animal or human sacrifices).

We entered the central tomb building to find a dimly lit but spacious abode, with a multilayered roof/wall woven of reeds and elephant-grass supported by fifty-six pillars each made from a trunk of the rukemia tree swaddled in barkcloth. The flooring was covered in intensely woven multicolored mats, and on one side of the building were two women busily weaving more. On the other edge were two women asleep under barkcloth blankets; visitors talked in low voices. Ronnie explained that while the age of dozens of royal concubines had passed, local women still took months-long shifts as ceremonial caretakers of the royal tombs.

At the far end, just before the great barkcloth curtain to the afterlife, stood a row of spears and shields crested by four photographic portraits of the most recently deceased Kings of Buganda.

The roof had a central circle of reed bundles modeled on a king’s head, expanding out into fifty-six progressively wider concentric circles representing the fifty-six clans that functioned as core socioeconomic units of traditional Bugandan society. Members of one’s own clan and one’s mother’s clan were considered kin, and forbidden as marriage prospects. Each clan had a traditional role: for example, the Buffalo clan served as outer-ring bodyguards, protectors of the king.

Ronnie pointed out a very elderly gentleman in a yellow suit seated as a guard/greeter at the door of the Kasubi Tombs complex, and told me that he was a Buffalo Clan man, 101 years old, and had served the kings of Buganda since the age of 16. A closed door marked the office of a Mushroom Clan inner-ring guard.

Ronnie himself was a member of the Otter Clan, and his mother was a member of the Leopard Clan. They were both artisan clans: it was the Otter Clan job to make the bark-cloth central to Bugandan textile culture, and the Leopard Clan job to decorate the palace. He verbally walked me through the steps in its production, starting with peeling the bark off part (not all!) of the trunk of a local Ficus natalensis tree. The “wound” was then protected with banana leaves, and could regrow new harvest-able bark in as little as eight months. If someone from the wrong clan tried to do this, it would allegedly “dry up.”

Once you had the bark, it was turned into cloth over the course of eight hours hammering on it with four different mallets. The first mallet removed the sap and water, the second hammered it thin and expanded its area, and the last two smoothed the surface even more. It was then sun-dried, sometimes smoked, and when complete served as the fundamental source of Bugandan clothing until cotton arrived in the 1800s. Amazingly, traditional Bugandan barkcloth is still a major export for the region, recently recognized by UNESCO as unique cultural heritage. It’s lately grown in popularity as a luxury “vegan leather,” used in a wide range of high-end products from some Mercedes-Benz car interiors to some of the costumes in the recent Hollywood productions Napoleon, Dungeons & Dragons, and Hamnet. Fascinating stuff: a centuries-old sustainable textile from the Otter Clan of Buganda is finding a new niche in the globalized world economy.

As we knelt on the woven mats in the cool, dark, airy, and quiet space under the spreading woven grass and reed roof, Ronnie gave me a quick summary of Uganda’s history as seen from the Bugandan royal compound. The kingdom of Buganda had formed centuries ago, likely unifying sometime in the 1300s and subsequently attaining regional hegemony over the Lake Victoria region, but intersected with European history in the late 1800s. King Mutesa I, the 30th Kabaka of Buganda, reigned from 1856 to 1884 and built relationships with multiple outside powers, half-converting to Islam while also welcoming British explorer Henry Morton Stanley and inviting Christian missionaries to his kingdom. He married 87 wives, and famously dictated a letter unsuccessfully proposing marriage to Queen Victoria. Upon his death, he was wrapped in 800 sheets of bark-cloth and buried in this very location, ordering in his will an end to the “mobile capital” burial tradition and enshrining the Kasubi tomb area as a permanent Bugandan royal cemetery.

His son, Mwanga II, had a truncated and unstable reign from 1884 to 1897, marked by his execution of the Christian “Ugandan Martyrs” and an escalating cession of sovereignty to the British Empire, culminating in the Kabaka leading a failed anti-British revolt. Mwanga II was forcibly replaced by his infant son Daudi Chwa II and soon died in exile in the Seychelles. The monarchy of Buganda continued its existence as essentially a local vassal of the British Empire, an arrangement rather similar to Indian “princely states” like Mysore.

In World War I, Bugandan forces in the King’s African Rifles successfully repulsed a German invasion and led a strike across the great lake into neighboring German East Africa (now Tanzania). After the war, the young king Daudi Chwa II visited Europe and America and returned as a Westernizer, abolishing taboos on which foods women could eat, allowing girls to go to school, building a football stadium, sponsoring translation of the Bible, and marrying only one woman in a Western-style church ceremony. He died of diabetes in 1939, succeeded by his son Mutesa II.

After Ugandan independence in 1963, Mutesa II was named the first ceremonial President of Uganda, but that didn’t last long. After Prime Minister Milton Obote and army chief Idi Amin were accused of gold smuggling in 1965, Obote seized power and abolished the monarchy in 1966, only to be overthrown himself by Amin in 1971. Amin’s rule was infamously psychotic, with megalomaniacal claims, reports of cannibalism, and the violent deportation of tens of thousands of ethnic Indians living in Uganda, including the parents of Rishi Sunak and Zohran Mamdani. Obote took power again after Amin was overthrown in 1979, but was himself overthrown by Yoweri Museveni in the mid-1980s. Mutesa II died in exile in London, but his Cambridge-educated son Muwenda Mutebi II was restored to the throne in 1993 with Museveni’s support and Mutesa’s remains eventually were laid to rest in the royal tombs. Museveni and Mutebi II still retain their respective offices today, with the four prior Kabakas of the age since European contact all buried together at Kasubi.

Back outside, a lightly smoking fireplace stood in the center of the right side of the compound. In the old days of the Buganda kingdom, warriors would muster here before the king and be fed with beef and beer. The fire stayed lit 24/7 (there was a clan dedicated to this responsibility) until a ceremonial extinguishing when a king died, after which it would be re-lit once the funeral was complete. Ronnie told me that it had been thus tended constantly since 1882.

Fascinatingly, historians have lately recognized that the history of the Kingdom of Buganda likely had a little-known “butterfly effect” repercussions on race relations in the United States and the British Empire. A young Winston Churchill toured Buganda in 1907, and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt visited Buganda in 1909 while on a massive East African big game hunting trip after leaving the White House. Both men were vocally and publicly impressed at the complexity and sophistication of the state structure, and raised awareness of Buganda’s accomplishments in the West. Centuries before the UK’s Glorious Revolution or the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Buganda had evolved a form of constitutional monarchy, with elected representatives serving in a parliament alongside the king. State capacity was very high. Networks of farms, mines, and orchards were linked by a network of wide roads across the kingdom, which not even dedicated imperialists could bring themselves to describe as another “mere” tribe. During the decade of the 1890s alone, the kingdom of Buganda harvested 30,000 trees to build 10,000 war canoes, the largest of which could carry half a ton of crew and cargo.

The fledgling NAACP ran an article about Buganda as an example of independent black civilizational accomplishment in 1910. When T.R. ran as the Progressive “Bull Moose” third-party candidate in 1912, seeking a non-consecutive third term, his platform was notably more “radical” on racial equality than his previous presidency had been, strongly advocating for African-American freedom. He lost, but substantively shifted the “Overton window” on race in American politics.

Even today, the Bugandan kingdom and its legacy are highly relevant in Uganda’s tumultuous politics. That fire in 2010 led to bloody riots when some Buganda loyalists believed that the government might have done it as an attack on the monarchy. Today, musician and democratic opposition leader Robert “Bobi Wine” Kyagulanyi is sometimes called the “King’s Rogue” for his devotion to the Bugandan royal family. After the January 2026 election saw widespread reports of illegal action, Museveni’s soldiers raided Wine’s house in March 2026, allegedly to kill him, and the opposition leader has now fled the country. It reminded me of what I’d read about French and British politics in the 1700s and early 1800s: a post-feudal world fully engaged in global capitalism and struggling to determine the new ground rules of their nation, with a “king’s party” just one force of many in the hotly contested arena.

And Uganda, like France and Britain at the dawn of the Fossil Age, is most definitely starting to hit the exponential growth stage of a new industrial revolution. Walking through the Katwe neighborhood this morning, I passed a little shop named Felicity Solar. Of course, I had to go check it out. They sold a range of photovoltaics-related goods, including the panels themselves in many different formats, integrated gadgets like solar streetlights, and several different forms of battery packs.

I noticed both lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery chemistries available, prepackaged home solar arrays in different sizes (for example, 12 KWh or 3.5 KWh daily consumption), and of course lots of “Made in China” package labels. A quick check online found that Felicity Solar is headquartered in Guangzhou, with operations around the world.

Moving on, I saw a giant billboard for Felicity Solar closer to the center of the city. The tagline was “Make life full of hope,” and the sign explicitly advertised home battery storage to help save money and guard against power blackouts. (Which were common; one had struck my Airbnb in Kampala the day before).

According to data from leading think tank Ember, Uganda’s solar imports from China have risen sharply lately, but from a very low base. They estimate that Uganda wasn’t even in the top twenty African countries in terms of solar growth in 2025. These stats and the above chart do undersell Uganda somewhat, though, as Uganda also imports a lot of solar from (coastal, port-rich) Kenya such that a lot of Chinese exports to Kenya likely end up in Uganda — and China’s exports to Kenya have absolutely skyrocketed lately!

No matter how you interpret the tentative efforts to measure a surge growing faster than statisticians can keep up with, there’s clearly a lot of room to grow for electrotech in Uganda. All this ferment I was seeing, the billboard ads throughout the city and the multiple solar and battery shops (I only visited one of the several I saw) and the electric motorcycles — it was all just the beginning.

It’s the most hackneyed of travel writer cliches to say that some location is interesting because it’s “a mix of old and new,” because that description applies to literally every human settlement on Earth. But, well, Kampala, Uganda is really notably a mix of old and new. Ancient kingdoms and modern electrotech, young people dividing their careers between tourism-focused our guides and traditional clan or clergy roles, centuries-old barkcloth making it to global luxury brands. Africa in the Anthropocene is a crucible for novel combinations of identities, cultures, and ways of living.

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After the day I got to visit Zipline Muhanga, I was so excited by the experience that I stayed up until the next dawn writing my article about it. Luckily, I’d already planned a “break” day around this time, with my already-complete interview with Arthur Snell set to publish, so the next day and a half was a fairly quiet time in Kigali city as I prepared to move on from Rwanda.

As I walked out from my lodgings substantially later in the day in search of a spot to write, I passed by a green space with substantial activity going on. A sign proclaimed that this was the GISOZO-MUKINDI & KINYINYA wetland rehabilitation project, happening at one of the 6 FLOOD RISK HOTSPOTS in the City of Kigali. This was one of the places I’d read about where another urban wetland park like Nyandungu was being constructed! I could see the workers planting vegetation, digging channels, and firming up banks with stone riprap. All the stuff I’d learned about in my soil and water management course back at my university.

I’d read that were just some bad flash floods in Mombasa, Kenya, one of my planned future stops on this trip. In addition to the biodiversity and recreation value, “sponge” surfaces like wetland parks are increasingly becoming mission-critical infrastructure for cities in the Anthropocene. It was great to see Kigali prioritizing that at such an early stage of development.

When walking around Kigali, I regularly kept passing congregations of electric motorcycle drivers, just hanging out at busy intersections or near bus stops to await customers for back-of-the-bike taxi services. Quickly recognizable by their quadrangular battery packs instead of internal combustion engines, as far as I saw they already substantially outnumbered cars and non-electric bikes on the roads of the city. Spiro and Ampersand were the two most prominent brands, and I’d already read about their networks of battery-swap stations. Generally several of them tried to sell me on a ride as I walked by, but they always backed off with good grace when I politely declined. It always made me happy to see these working-class street-level manifestations of the electrotech revolution!

I was also charmed by the hadada ibises, a common urban bird across sub-Saharan Africa. Their cry sounded like an angry small child, so much so that on the first hearing it took me a while to associate with the large waterbirds on a nearby roof.

Just in general, walking the streets of Kigali gave me a strong sense of progress, of momentum. Everywhere there were new-looking pharmacies, schools, clinics, little indie mechanic and phone repair tech shops, apartment buildings, even normally-unremarkable fundamentals like bustling tile and wire companies — the infrastructure of modernity. Ads for digital bank accounts and finance apps were common. Power lines arced everywhere. Most people in the street had smartphones. The remaining open sewers were literally getting covered over with concrete sidewalks in real time. And I was about the only visibly foreign person I’d seen since I left the airport — this wasn’t some tourist enclave, this is how the people of Rwanda live today.

One random moment that I found really striking happened when I texted my Airbnb that I’d like to check in. And my host— just a dude who was renting out the spare room in his house and had great reviews on the app — said that he wasn’t home right now, but he’d leave the door unlocked so I could just walk in off the Kigali street. And he did, and I just walked in. He felt comfortable doing that. The “Rwanda is becoming Africa’s Singapore” narrative never felt more apt.

All this got me thinking about the geography of Africa, the rise of African cities, and how, in my opinion, Africa’s many nations are rapidly “differentiating” from each other in a way that I don’t think the rest of the world has quite caught up to yet.

The population density of Africa is distributed extremely unevenly across the great continent. There are some incredibly high-population density areas in Africa, like core regions of Nigeria and Ethiopia, the Nile Valley of Egypt, or almost all of Rwanda and much of the surrounding countries in the African Great Lakes region. There are also huge swathes of wild lands, the deserts of Sahara and Namib and Kalahari, the great Congo rainforest, the Sudd wetlands and the Serengeti plain, in which megafauna might roam or militias might lurk.

Another way of putting this is to say that if you drew circles around the areas home to half of all Africa’s one-billion-and-change total human population, it would only cover five disconnected areas of the continent. As shown in the map above, the five clusters of coastal West Africa plus Nigeria, the Mediterranean Maghreb, Egypt’s Nile Valley, the heartlands of Ethiopia, and the African Great Lakes region add up to over six hundred million, with a similar number inhabiting the entire rest of the continent, from Cape Town to Kinshasa to Benghazi.

On this trip, of course, I’m right in the heart of the African Great Lakes population cluster, which includes all of Rwanda, most of Uganda, much of Kenya, and parts of Tanzania and the D.R. Congo.

In the 21st century, Africa is now experiencing that transformational “strategically located villages becoming big important cities overnight” phase of growth that Europe and North America had in the 19th and Asia had in the 20th. Africa is home to the fastest-growing human settlements on Earth, and the percentage of the African population (itself fast-growing!) that lives in cities rose from under 15% in 1950 to over 50% by the late 2010s. (One study calculates that in addition to standard economic factors, African urbanization is likely being sped up even further by climate change, as cities offer more opportunity and security than drying farmlands).

Just based on what I’ve seen living in Kigali for a few days, these rising African cities look to Asia at least as much as America and Europe for their models of modernity. Much of the technology, as I have written, is Chinese and electric. Much of the food, I’ve noticed, is Indian: I’ve seen tons of samosas and chapatis for sale on the Kigali streets, far more than any other recognizably non-Rwandan cuisine. (Unless you count coffee and tea, but those are pretty global by now). And much of the popular culture is American1 and European: the English language is common, and I’ve seen several people wearing American sports team logos, hairstyles and clothing, and often heard American songs playing. It’s a fascinating historical serendipity, a “full circle” moment if you will, that Africa, the continent of humanity’s origins, is now the last heavily populated continent to urbanize and is thus becoming a crucible of influences from so many different descendant cultures from around the world.

As parts of Africa are developing much more rapidly than others, the differences between countries will become increasingly apparent and important. Or to put it in a more “LinkedIn” sounding news-you-can-use way: you better start recognizing which African country is which, so you know the difference between the one that just produced the brilliant new startup disrupting your industry and the one that just produced the scary new terrorist group disrupting your country’s foreign policy.

We in the rest of the world really ought to get out of the habit of thinking of “Africa” as one monolithic culture. The word’s used as if it refers to one really large country, like “China” or “India.” You know, lions, huts, elephants, guys with spears, starving children, military coups…Africa. It’s like saying “Asia” and not saying whether you mean Singapore or Afghanistan, or “Europe” and not saying whether you mean Switzerland or Belarus, or “North America” and not saying whether you mean Canada or El Salvador. They’re pretty different! I feel like people automatically grok that for other continents,2 but “Africa” is still undifferentiated below the Sahara in much of the popular imagination. That’s rapidly becoming an outdated conflation. (Sure, most of modern sub-Saharan African is descended from the great Bantu migrations, but that’s kind of like saying that everyone from France to Bangladesh is a descendant of Proto-Indo-European speakers. It’s true and interesting, but not that helpful in comparing today’s cultures).

This growing difference in living standards between different African countries is, of course, profoundly good news — it means that many regions of Africa are developing fast and outgrowing their old stereotypes.

And it’s important to recognize and distinguish where that’s happening, because it is also true that there are big parts of Africa that still do resemble the old stereotypes of unrelieved extreme poverty. For example, since I’ve been in Africa, there’s been news that a rough coalition of extreme jihadists and Tuareg separatists have launched major attacks on the (military dictatorship, recently coup-installed) government of Mali in the Sahel, killing the defense minister and possibly taking over at least one major city as of this writing. These militants’ mastery of newly cheap and flexible drone weapons is widely credited with their recent military success. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mali became a hardliner Islamic Republic very soon, and/or a Tuareg state of Azawad successfully seceding in the north.

Mali covers a vast geographical area, larger than France and Ukraine put together, and is home to around 26 million people. Rwanda is roughly the size of North Macedonia, over forty-five times physically smaller! Absolutely tiny by comparison, but Rwanda is home to around 14 million people, more than half of vast Mali’s population. And Rwanda is made up of densely populated fertile hilly arable land in that African Great Lakes cluster, while a big chunk of Mali consists of Sahara Desert and much of the rest of it is rough Sahel drylands. Rwanda’s mostly Christian (various denominations) while Mali’s mostly Muslim, Kinyarwanda is a Bantu language while Bambara is a Mande language, Rwanda is much more stable, developed, and fast-growing…African countries are different from each other in a lot of ways. Really really different. And what’s going on in Mali is about as relevant to me in Rwanda as the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was to Singapore, or the brutal Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus is to Switzerland, or the Bukele internment camps in El Salvador are to Canada. Maybe the impacts are not at zero, but they’re essentially imperceptible in terms of day-to-day life. Rwanda and Mali may feel easy to mentally lump together, but they’re poles apart in a multitude of ways.

All this may be a bit of a tangent, but I feel it’s a simple but important point to make — Africa is really big, and complex, and diverse, and changing fast. That will shape much of the next century.

I left Kigali — and Rwanda — on the afternoon of April 26th, returning to the throngs of the Nyabugogo Bus Station and buying an overnight bus ticket for Kampala, Uganda from the Trinity transit company. (Sadly, this one was not electric). We left at 3 PM, and arrived in Kampala the next morning, one time zone away at 7 AM. I spent most of the trip rereading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, losing myself in the epic sci-fi saga of a hyper-evolved spider civilization. There was a break around 9 PM to cross customs at the Ugandan border, and at some unnoticed point after that we crossed the Equator, south to north, my first such crossing overland. Rwanda had been at the northern edge of the Southern Hemisphere, and Kampala is just barely back in the Northern Hemisphere. More hours of reading passed as the bus sped along the dark roads of the Ugandan night.

Then, at around 4:30 AM, I heard a popping sound like a small explosion, a lurch and a wobble as the floor shook, and the bus skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. A tire had burst. Fortunately, no one was hurt; it had barely been more of a jostle than the potholes (increasingly noticeable since we crossed the border). I think there must have been more damage than just the tire bursting, as the drivers’ efforts to fix it met with no success for about half an hour as we the passengers waited on the side of the road while trucks carrying shipping containers whizzed by.

Eventually, with admirable speed, the company had another one of their buses stop and pick us up. We arrived in Kampala in the early morning of April 27. I wrote some of this article in a cafe about a hundred meters away from the bus terminal, where I stopped for breakfast and device charging, and I’m finishing it in a new Airbnb. I’m excited to go forth and explore more of Uganda in the upcoming days!

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Arthur Snell is a former British Foreign Office diplomat with field experience in Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. More recently, he has been an independent geopolitical risk consultant, and has advised the government of Ukraine during the current war. He is the author of the new book Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It. He writes on Substack at .

Not all doom

Geopolitics, history and mountains.

By Arthur Snell

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Snell’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

You’ve had a fascinating career around the world. This is obviously a bit too big of a question, but what do you think are some of the defining changes of the 21st century so far?

To me, the big ones off the top of my head are America’s descent from global hegemon to increasingly a rogue state, and on a much more upbeat note, the incredible rise of renewable energy, the rise of China as the first electrostate, solar just outpacing every possible prediction, battery chemistry diversifying and providing a lot more resilience.

So what are your thoughts on the 21st century so far? Which is almost exactly my lifetime, incidentally.

A defining moment for me personally, but I think it’s part of this story, is 9/11. Obviously 2001, in your lifetime, but you probably don’t have a memory of it. But I think that defined America’s behavior for a decade and a half at least. and it’s part of America’s descent from this global hegemon with a generally kind of benign direction into what it is now. We’re watching this thing unfold. It doesn’t want to participate in global climate action. It’s increasingly active in a range of conflicts that are of questionable legality A lot of that has its origin in the 9/11 moment.

I think a lot of people look at the personality of Donald Trump, but Trump couldn’t happen in a vacuum. You had to have a political environment that was enabling for Trump. I think that began with 9/11.

The response to 9/11 took America down quite a dark path. Think of the Iraq War, which was basically launched on a false premise, the so-called WMDs that were going to be discovered in Iraq. You had an element of cynicism coupled with a willingness to use military aggression outside the norms of war, outside the norms of international legality. It seems to me that that then leached into a much wider array of areas, and that’s where the climate story comes into this. Because it was of course George W. Bush who withdrew America from the Kyoto Protocol. Which is almost the beginning point of America’s role as a kind of spoiler and a kind of negative actor in global climate action.

Now, obviously, you have the presidency of Barack Obama, an attempt to push back against that. Again, Joseph Biden, obviously, a shorter presidency. But you no longer made the assumption that the U.S. is on board with these actions.

And in the same period of course climate denialism grows and grows. It has a particular strength in America. What’s really interesting is that climate denial is actually quite unusual globally. It’s not a major political force in most countries in the world, but it’s a major political force in the U.S. I guess the only other place where it had some purchase was in Brazil. But even there, I’m not sure that it had a kind of general cultural landing. The idea of rejecting the concept of man-caused global heating seems to be a very specifically American one.

That’s interesting, because the U.S. is so unique in so many ways. It’s the world’s third-largest country, and it’s also the most religious of the developed countries, and it’s also a huge fossil fuel producer in a way that many other developed countries are not. It’s an outlier on a whole lot of graphs, so to speak. And I suspect all of that overlaps in creating a very strong constituency, between the religiosity and the fossil fuel business, for not wanting to believe that humans could change Earth’s climate.

I think that’s right. I think that religiosity is very important. And the significance of the fossil fuel business.

But actually, we’ve talked about the 21st century, but I will, being a bit older than you, stretch us back to the 20th century.

The 20th century is the hydrocarbon century. We can talk about the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and the use of coal, but the really massive expansion of CO₂ emissions is a 20th century story.

And the 20th century is the American century. I think you can’t disentangle those two things. The global power of the United States was completely tied up with the access to and the use of hydrocarbon energy.

We’ll come back to the point that you made, Sam, about the transition and that being led by China and the rapidity of it. The projections constantly being overtaken, and the cost collapsing.

People are still arguing, oh, this stuff is very expensive, it needs subsidies. Well, as you will know, it isn’t. The cheapest form of energy now is renewable energy.

So all those things are happening, and it’s a profound shift, and it’s happening at the time that the U.S. is losing its role as the global hegemon.

I think you have to recognize that these two issues, the passing of the hydrocarbon age and the passing of the American age, are one issue.

What’s so frustrating about that, as an American, is that it did not have to be that way.

No. You’ve got all the technology, all the great universities, all the science...Yeah, you guys could have been leading the renewable energy revolution. Absolutely.

If we go back to 1973, a year that in some ways is a bit like 2026, there was a political crisis and a military crisis in the Middle East. Energy prices went through the roof. And shortly afterwards, the U.S. government started looking at alternative energy sources. This was particularly pushed by President Carter slightly later. And at that time, of course, because it was quite an obscure subject, it wasn’t politicized. There wasn’t a right or left position on solar panels or whatever.

There was a hot minute in the early 70s where President Nixon was trying to build tons of nuclear power plants and many Democrats were like, “keep jobs for coal miners!” The politics of energy have changed a lot.

Yeah, they have. Even then the Democrat position was around jobs and livelihoods. No one was arguing about whether or not this thing called carbon dioxide might be an issue, because it was just too obscure. It was something that a very small number of scientists were aware of. It was a very obscure subject. It wasn’t really until the 1980s that the big oil companies in the US started to spend money on trying to undermine the science, to try to effectively do a disinformation campaign to undermine the case for anthropogenic global heating.

The statistics on China’s dominance of the renewable energy industry are just extraordinary. Generally over 80 percent, sometimes over 90 percent of all manufacturing in solar, wind, batteries, all these fundamental technologies of the electric age.

Renewable energy exports accounted for something like 10 percent of their GDP last year. They’ve been consistently installing more solar than the whole rest of the world combined for the last several years, and keep breaking their own record.

I was just in China recently in January, writing a series of articles and traveling around, and I was blown away. Beijing’s air quality, which was apocalyptic in 2013, was actually great. Clear blue sky when I was there.

Most of the vehicles on the road were EVs. I took electric high-speed trains around the country. I saw the huge transmission lines pulling power from Xinjiang to Shenzhen.

The thing that I think people don’t realize about renewable energy, although they’re starting to now, is that it’s not just mitigation of the climate crisis. It’s adaptation to the climate crisis. It’s resilience. It’s decentralized. It’s harder to kill. It’s less reliant on international supply chains.

What are your opinions on the geopolitical implications of all this?

I write about this in my book. It’s a very classic Chinese story, in the sense of having a long-term plan, having a politically stable situation. Of course, I don’t support an autocratic state as a concept, but the political stability has allowed them to pursue these objectives. And has allowed them, as you just described very eloquently, to completely dominate this sector. As you’ll be well aware, it’s the whole supply chain. It’s the processing of critical minerals. It’s the installation that they’re doing to transform their own economy, but also capturing the entire manufacturing cradle-to-grave supply chain.

The geopolitical implications are profound, because there are a lot of countries in the world that have no problem with adopting Chinese technology. They will do that, and they will do it readily. It is cheap! And as you say, there are all the other advantages of renewable energy.

I mean, we’ve experienced in March and April of this year, once again, a hydrocarbon-based war in the Middle East. Ultimately what became the bone of contention in the war, what it came down to, was the blockage of the Straits of Hormuz, which is a crucial maritime passage for exporting hydrocarbons around the world.

So that’s what the war was about. Once again, it’s a hydrocarbon war.

Not all doom

Ouroboros - the amazing self-eating war

What are the aims of US-Israeli war on Iran? We all know that at the beginning of the war we were served up a range of answers to what should be a fairly obvious question. It was to prevent Iran’s ‘imminent’ access to a nuclear weapon. Perhaps even to prevent an imminent attack on America…

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2 months ago · 53 likes · Arthur Snell

And so, of course, everywhere, governments, ordinary people, thinkers, journalists are all saying, we’ve got to get off our addiction to these dangerous energy sources. It’s not just what it’s doing to the planet, but what it’s doing to our dependence on a small number of countries, where an economic shock doubles the cost of your energy.

Coming back to the geopolitics of it for China, there are loads of countries that will just adopt Chinese technology, mostly Global South countries, without any concerns.

Then you have the Western countries, or the Global North, whatever, where there is a lot of reluctance. Some of that is understandable. There are clearly issues around protection of IP, privacy concerns and so on. Modern energy systems are complex, they involve all kinds of networked systems.

But where it gets complicated for those global north countries is that actually there are hardly any alternatives. I mean, South Korea is still a player in this space, but the Chinese have made such advances, and they’re continuing.

The story of Tesla is quite an interesting one. Setting Elon Musk’s really strange political journey, just looking at the company and the car it produces, they were the world leader in EVs. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. But they’re by absolutely no means the world leader anymore. And once again, it’s China that is constantly innovating and pushing ahead.

This new world, this electrified world, is one in which China is undoubtedly the world leader.

And of course, it’s at a time when China’s economy is anyway edging towards becoming the world’s largest economy, overtaking the U.S. And what goes with that is, if you have a hegemonic power it expects certain geopolitical privileges. The Americans have enjoyed that for a century, and it may be that China expects that too.

That has implications for things like the status of Taiwan. I wouldn’t predict a conflict. I would predict that actually we get to a point where America is in no position to defend Taiwan and doesn’t try to do it, and China is able to, in their terms, “reunite” with Taiwan. Or if you were Taiwanese, you might say annex Taiwan. Whatever terminology you use, the effect would be the same.

We’re seeing increasingly a waning of America’s military preeminence. This overlaps with the Electrotech Revolution too, because China has overwhelmingly the majority of the world’s drone manufacturing. As we’ve seen in Ukraine and Iran, that’s become a central weapon of war.

There’s an argument, and it’s kind of an out-of-the-box argument, that one of the best chances for stable world peace now might be nuclear proliferation. That countries that are at risk of being invaded, that are bordered by countries that have shown expansionist tendencies, like Ukraine and Poland and the Baltic states, and Japan and South Korea and Taiwan, and perhaps even Mexico and Canada, should develop nuclear weapons. What is your opinion?

Noahpinion

Japan, South Korea, and Poland need nuclear weapons immediately

In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty…

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a year ago · 298 likes · 101 comments · Noah Smith

It’s very interesting, and it’s an argument which has been growing in foreign policy circles.

It’s an argument that still sits slightly in a kind of intellectual space rather than a political space.

If we take a look at Ukraine, this is a great case study. Of course, Ukraine did have nuclear weapons at the end of the Soviet Union. Now, it never had a serious intention of having that as its own nuclear deterrent. The Soviet Union collapsed and effectively Russia’s weapons were stranded in Ukraine.

Ukraine gave up those weapons under security guarantees from the United States and United Kingdom.

Well, we all know what happened. The guarantee did not work. The U.S. and the UK did not defend Ukraine against Russian aggression. Now, if Ukraine had still had nuclear weapons, I think we’d be pretty sure that the Russians wouldn’t have tried to invade it.

Not all doom

Four Years of Defiance

It would be impossible to write an article that did adequate justice to Ukraine’s incredible achievement. Four years ago, faced with a nuclear armed power and one of the world’s largest conventional forces, it did something that not even the best-informed intelligence agencies thought was possible. It confounded Russia’s invasion plan. Of course, it did…

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3 months ago · 40 likes · Arthur Snell

And that reality is causing a lot of countries to think again about this. One of the countries that has had a more public discussion of it is Poland. Of course, Poland has a history of centuries of conflict with Russia. On several occasions in history Poland has disappeared from the map due to the imperial activities of Russia and other countries. Poland is now one of the most vibrant and significant economies in Europe. It is a country that has a big military and a big military budget and very ambitious plans to keep growing its military.

And that being the case, does it make sense for Poland to explore having nuclear weapons? Because it is in an unstable part of Europe. It shares borders with Ukraine. It shares borders with a lot of conflicted countries.

It’s very strange to be arguing for nuclear proliferation. But one wonders whether, in fact, it offers a kind of guarantee. Modern warfare, particularly drone warfare, is getting easier. The barrier to entry for a country to be able to attack a neighbor has gotten lower. Iran has these very low cost Shahed drones, and it is able to cause havoc in countries in the Arabian Gulf, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and so on, at very low cost to itself.

Iran’s military budget is a fraction of the budget of those Arab Gulf countries and yet Iran has managed to really upend their economic model in a few short weeks.

Not all doom

The Gulf Between Ambition and Capability

Before I start, it feels important to state some obvious truths. The Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran (and its allies in Lebanon) is an undertaking of epic, bizarre stupidity. There appears to be no realistic chance that it results in the seizure of Iran’s enriched uranium or the downfall of the Islamic Republic. In that sense, any talk of “disarming” the Is…

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2 months ago · 39 likes · Arthur Snell

Speaking of which, the global mega-shift to renewable energy who are the winners and losers of that? Obviously China’s the winner because they’ve invested so much in the technology manufacturing, and America really seems to be determined on doubling down on sabotaging its own renewable energy efforts.

You’ve mentioned that the states that are almost entirely reliant on hydrocarbon extraction will all be seeing serious challenges, like the Gulf states.

Yeah, exactly. There’s two ways to look at this. There’s economic impacts, and then there are climate impacts. Now, of course, those are completely interlinked. But if we think about the Gulf states, it’s where those two things cross over in a really intense way.

Anybody who’s been to one of the Gulf countries in July or August knows, it’s almost impossible to operate. You spend your entire time inside in air conditioned buildings. The temperatures reach the point that humans can’t exist. People die of heat exhaustion. And that’s now. That’s in 2026. This is going to get a lot worse. The projections are for temperatures in the 60 degrees Celsius range. It’s not functional for humans.

At the same time, as you rightly observed, these are countries whose economies are completely based on hydrocarbon extraction. Now what’s interesting, and I think some of the conflict we’re seeing in the Middle East relates to this, is that these countries have been trying to transition their economies, not necessarily in the sense of an energy transition, but an economic transition.

An example of that succeeding is Dubai. Succeeding until recently. Dubai has created an entrepôt for tourism, financial investments, property development. It’s not an energy economy at all. It’s a different kind of economic model. But what we’ve seen in this war is that it’s quite hard to run that model in a very, very unstable part of the world. If your business model is people staying in luxury five-star hotels and Instagram influencers and all this stuff, and there’s drones flying over there? That doesn’t work. Dubai is looking at a very serious crisis there.

Saudi Arabia, they had Vision 2030. That, again, was a very ambitious program to transition Saudi economy. from an oil-based economy to a post-oil economy based on a mixture of tourism and business.

Vision 2030 has failed.

I mean, that is a statement of fact. It is not going to succeed in making that transition. And some of the biggest projects that were part of that, most notably NEOM, which was this new city, this weird long line in the desert with endless AI-type videos online showing you how cool it was going to be, it’s basically not happening. They’ve scaled back the plans almost to zero. It’s not going to happen.

Not all doom

Neom was never real.

In July 2023 I wrote a post looking at the gap between what the Saudis have claimed for Neom, and by extension other elements of their Vision 2030 project, and the reality. It got lots of pushback from people who make money from the Saudis, as you might expect. But I was pretty confident that the ambition would come to little and that the overall projec…

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7 months ago · 51 likes · Arthur Snell

So what you’re looking at is a region of the world where they’ve probably got a couple of decades left of extraordinary wealth. There is clearly a huge demand for the oil and gas at the moment, as this recent war reminds us but they’ve got a cliff edge.

And to my mind, that is actually part of the explanation of why these wars are happening. Because what you’re looking at is countries desperately trying to become a regional hegemon for those last decades of wealth and plenty, before this moment of crunch where, effectively, they’re going to go over the cliff.

One of the things to remember is that this is a place where you have autocratic monarchies.

And if the ruler is young, someone like MBS, he knows he’s going to be still ruling Saudi Arabia 30 years from now. So for him, this isn’t just like a normal politician. “Well, you know, my successor’s successor might have to deal with this.”

No, he has to deal with this.

He will be ruling Saudi Arabia at the point where the demand for global hydrocarbons collapses. So this is a personal fear that probably keeps him awake at night.

Not all doom

Live: What happens to the Middle East when no one wants its oil? With Arthur Snell

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2 months ago · 21 likes · Arthur Snell and The New World

I obviously want to avoid a humanitarian crisis there, but Saudi Arabia has built out a huge amount of solar farms and desalination plants. It seems plausible that even in a 60-degree Celsius future summer, with some stable management, a lot of these Gulf states could become like a Mars colony on Earth, essentially. Desalinating their water, solar power, everyone is in air conditioned buildings.

In terms of influence on the world, I’m not really inclined to feel upset about a decrease in wealth for these autocratic monarchies. The UAE’s funded the mass-murdering RSF in Sudan. The Gulf states have paid substantial bribes in cryptocurrency to the current U.S. regime.

They have funded some good renewables and infrastructure development in Africa with stuff like Masdar and DP World, but they’ve also funded just a vast amount of corruption and insidious political influence in democracies.

Obviously this is a huge question, but is that a net positive?

I take your point. These are not sympathetic cases. And you’re absolutely right about the renewable energy. These countries are investing in it. They’re not climate deniers. They might deny actions to end fossil fuel use at the COP summit and that sort of thing. But they’re not climate deniers. They are investing and they’re aware of this shift.

But I think there’s a couple of issues there. There are different dynamics, and this is why I focus on Saudi.

The countries where you have a small citizenry, so Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, the number of citizens in all those countries is a small number. And it’s possible, maybe, that you could continue effectively to live off the interest of your capital, basically. Your economy becomes quite unproductive, but you could keep the lights on from long term investments, like a kind of pension.

Saudi Arabia is very different. Saudi Arabia has a big population. It’s going to hit 50 million by the next decade. You can’t operate that model in the same way where effectively you don’t really expect the citizens to work and you manage it through migrant workers.

But then let’s talk about migrant workers, because you mentioned that.

Now, obviously, the way these people are treated is deplorable, and they have very few legal rights, very unsafe working conditions, there are lots of tragedies, lots of accidents and so on.

But again, at a certain point, they might struggle to recruit these workers, because if you can’t actually operate outside, are people still going to risk their lives in order to work in those environments, particularly if they’re coming from countries whose own economies are growing?

So most of these workers are coming from Southeast Asia, South Asia. They do it because they want to send money back to their family. They want to work for a few years, go back, maybe build a home or whatever. It’s completely understandable.

And one might say when it works, although we could question the conditions and all that, it’s a positive because it allows people to improve their economic situation.

But at a certain point, the system breaks down if it’s actually not possible to get people to work outside. Or you can only do it for a few months of the year, so therefore construction projects become much slower.

There are all kinds of knock-on impacts of this shift, which again, I think a lot of people haven’t really thought their way through.

And this overlaps with another big trend, which is the massive global demographic shift. We’re used to a world of massive human population growth, since really the Industrial Revolution, where there’s just always another worker coming along in a minute, and that’s really changing.

China’s population has been declining since 2023. India just fell below replacement-level fertility.

Is the answer that all of these places are just going to eventually double down on Africa for migrant labor? Is there going to be increasingly competition for migrant labor? Will this be counterbalanced by just climate disasters pushing people to move? Or will we eventually be looking at a scarcity of migrants when historically they’re viewed, however unfairly, as a burden?

That’s an interesting question, and it’s one I haven’t really looked at. I think climate will cause a lot of migration, and we haven’t really touched on that. I think it’s very likely that you’ll see migration out of Saudi Arabia and out of a lot of the Arab world. We talked a lot about the Gulf states but of course you’ve got states in the Arab world that face similar climate impacts but that don’t even have the economic cushion that we talk about. Egypt, or Iraq. And Iran is not an Arab state, but it’s a state of nearly 100 million people, again with very severe climate risks coming down the track. So I think we’re going to see a lot of migration.

And again, with Africa, in particular, the Sahel region, as you’ll be aware, across the entire band from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, you’ve seen a real destabilization of every single country. You can draw a line. There’s been a military coup in every country over a short period. Unstable governments, foreign intervention. You have the French, and then you have Wagner, this Russian mercenary group. You’ve got, obviously, the war in Sudan, again, on that line.

Not all doom

Chaos in the Sahel: the fall of Mali

In 2021, the Biden administration decided to implement 2020 Trump’s surrender deal with the Taliban largely unaltered, making a minor delay to the final departure date of US troops. There was no reason for the US to do this, as the Taliban had not kept to the terms of the deal, but there were arguments which I had some sympathy with: that the billions o…

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6 months ago · 15 likes · Arthur Snell

Those are countries which do still have very high birth rates. I think you’re going to see a lot of migration out of there.

Migration is a complicated subject. We’ve seen it weaponized by right-wing politicians all over the world. It remains the case that most migrants don’t leave their country, or if they do they go to the nearest country. There’s this myth that all these people are going to come to Europe or that Central America will all go up to north America. But there is definitely going to be more of this.

One of the interesting areas that I looked at in terms of migration which I haven’t seen particularly well covered elsewhere, is migration out of China caused by climate. Because, of course, China is doing amazing things, but parts of China become very hard to live in in a climate crisis or climate breakdown world. Particularly the northern Chinese plain where you get these very dangerous summer wet bulb temperatures, intense humidity and heat.

Now, we’ve already seen that quite a lot of Chinese migrant workers are working in eastern Siberia, so in the Far East of Russia. The numbers are hard to track because the Russian government doesn’t really want to record it, but they’re quite happy to have the labor because it’s an extremely sparsely populated area.

As the climate shifts, you get new areas that are better placed for agriculture in that Far East of Russia, which a few years ago were not functional as agricultural zones. We might see quite a shift of that.

And of course, what’s interesting about that is that historically China lays claim to those territories.

Those were territories that Imperial Russia, seized from China in the 19th century, in 1860. The climate is sort of redrawing a map.

I’m not suggesting that China is going to go and invade Russia. Again, nuclear armed states are very unlikely to go to war. But I think you might have a kind of economic colonization unfolding as Russia’s economy is very dependent on China. Increasingly. Especially since the Ukraine war.

And also, China is now richer than Russia in many ways. When Chinese locals go to Russia, they’re not working as like, household servants or something. I’m just explaining this for readers. Because this is not at all similar to the case of Mexicans coming to America. Today, the Chinese going to Russia, they’re generally setting up an essentially extraterritorial little colony. like a mining or lumber camp, where it’s all Chinese people extracting resources for the benefit of China, so to speak.

Yeah, exactly. And in fact, that idea of extraterritoriality, what I think is so interesting about this is that if we go back to the late 19th, early 20th century in China, Western countries did exactly that. They had cantonments. There would be a district of Shanghai where British law ran or French law or American law.

For China, understandably, this is seen as a period of humiliation. Western powers came to China and didn’t even respect Chinese law. They operated their own laws within a certain space, effectively a kind of colonial system where the white man was seen as superior and so on.

I’m not suggesting that China will replicate that model. But a version of that may be coming in the future where because of China’s economic and geopolitical power, it operates economic colonies. Special economic zones, things like that, where probably Chinese law and Chinese norms are enforced, even though they sit geographically in another state.

And we’re already seeing more of those. Like the Simandou Corridor in Guinea. The giant iron mine that’s essentially just Guinea leasing the rights to mine a huge amount of iron to China in exchange for a percentage for the Guinean government, which is one of those Sahel governments formed by a military coup in the 2020s.

Yes, exactly.

A constellation of Chinese cantonments, SEZs and places like that, is to some extent already forming.

But, sort of in the same way that migrant workers voluntarily going to the Gulf states are often abused but often do manage to return home with enough money to improve the lives of their families, is that bad?

A lot of really impoverished countries in the world might benefit from Chinese investment, even if it’s completely transactional, if it comes with some spillover effects with more Chinese technology, stuff like that.

What’s your opinion on the rise of Chinese extraterritorial zones?

Well, in a way, I might say it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad and it doesn’t matter what I think. Ultimately, as you say, this is an economic reality.

If someone starts a mine and creates jobs, that is adding economic opportunity or at least economic activity to a certain place.

Now, of course, there are specific things that happen which will be bad. The safety in some of these mines. Rulers of countries are probably being paid corruptly. But of course, we’re now existing in a time when the United States is also perfectly comfortable with that model. Clearly, this is rather like nineteenth-century colonialism. I’m not going to try to defend it, but it clearly brought economic activity, both in the form of extraction but also in the form of development. That is probably what we will see as a result of China’s activities, whether we’re talking about Africa or Latin America or whatever.

On a more positive note, there’s a new report from Ember on this, it looks like in quite a lot of countries, Pakistan’s the most famous one but increasingly much of Africa as well, solar exports from China to that country are much greater than the country’s own tracking of solar being installed. Implying that there’s quite a lot of invisible small-scale solar, so to speak, that isn’t appearing in government registries. In Pakistan that’s now like a fifth of their entire electricity system!

In countries that are willing to trade with China, there’s a mass grassroots adoption of small-scale solar. My personal pet theory of optimism is that that really, really, really blunts the impact of the climate crisis. Not even primarily through mitigation of emissions, but in, like, charging one phone so the people of a whole village can get a weather report ahead of a storm.

When I was in Delhi in 2024 during a record heat wave, just one little fan in a little paratha shop was like a little cooling oasis for the neighborhood. Even a little power can really save people from climate disruption, and there’s now so much power being spread with solar panels!

What are your thoughts on the global decentralized clean energy surge?

That’s really interesting. Anecdotally, I’ve seen the same from my travels in Global South countries. People act out of simple economic self-interest and calculation. And if you live in a country where the grid energy is both unreliable and expensive, and somebody is saying, well, look, you can heat water with this thing, that’s becoming incredibly common all over. Now, for not very much money, you can install PV. Whether it’s micro-scale, just to charge your phone, or people on the fringes of the middle class feeling able to, power their homes with a few larger panels.

You have this kind of political argument going on with politicians, particularly in North America, saying this stuff is all a scam and it’s never going to happen. Meanwhile, people in Pakistan or wherever are just going to go and buy a panel and get on with it.

Another country where you see it is Nigeria, which is a famously poor country. The electric grid system is terrible, years of underinvestment and corruption mean the amount of generation for the country is tiny given the size of its economy. But again, there’s just a whole invisible private grid that that is growing all the time that we can’t see. It’s quite hard to measure, but it’s definitely there.

And that could save a lot of lives. That could really transform the outlook for Nigeria and Pakistan. That could redefine our very concept of developed, kind of in the same way that a lot of Africa got Wi-Fi before paved roads.

Yeah, totally. And of course, it’s an enabler for all the other things because, you know, try running a business without power. I worked as a diplomat in Nigeria, very much in the hydrocarbon era, in 1999 and around that time. Within the British Embassy, obviously a highly resourced environment, we relied on diesel generators. They would have to kick in four or five times most days! Most people don’t have that. Try running any kind of normal business when the power goes out for four or five times every day!

So there’s the economic boost you get from having an energy source. If you know daylight hours in Nigeria, you’re never going to lack solar energy!

There’s an emerging wave of studies, and this is a very niche area, finding that renewable energy, particularly solar farms but also offshore wind, can not just not harm, but actually have positive benefits for biodiversity and crop productivity on the same area.

There’s the whole field of agrivoltaics. In dry areas, solar panel shade can reduce UV exposure and retain moisture in the soil. You can actually grow more food if you have solar panels in the same field also producing electricity!

There’s even studies from the deserts of China and the grasslands of Colorado, showing increased biodiversity and wildlife in a place where you just built a solar farm than in a wild landscape nearby. There’s more native plants, more biodiversity!

I’m really interested in the possibility of these electrotech landscapes spreading.

Effectively, you’re talking about a kind of canopy, aren’t you? It’s a canopy of PVs rather than mature trees.

I haven’t looked into that much. Certainly here in the UK, in rural Britain, you have, some would say, an overly protected landscape. You’ve got a lot of farmland, not wilderness, not national parks, it’s agricultural farmland but it’s treated under zoning and planning laws as if it were a sort of protected wilderness.

There’s been a lot of people trying to push against solar panels and saying that they’re unsightly, they’re misusing land that should be put to food production.

But actually what some farmers are saying is, look, we’re using this land for food production but we’ve got solar panels on it as well! Whether it’s having poultry underneath the panels or sheep to graze, there’s all kinds of things you could do with this land as well as use it for electricity production!

One of these arguments that hasn’t really broken out for people people to be aware of is the fact that putting a big solar installation in a place does not stop you from using it for other purposes, and it may have beneficial impacts.

That’s something I’m really excited about!

What are your thoughts the potential for more rewilded landscapes? Moving out of the politics realm. We’ve seen a lot of rewilded landscapes recently, especially in Europe. We’ve seen huge shifts in land cover as people withdraw from farms.

And now a lot of countries, including some countries that are traditionally thought of as developing countries, places like Colombia, Chile, Sri Lanka, Thailand, are now hitting very low total fertility rates. China’s now below 1.0 TFR!

It may be selection bias, but I feel like whenever I see a country with notably huge declines in fertility rate, I can also immediately find tons of really big new conservation projects and protected areas. Maybe that’s cultural-psychological, a sense of enough space for both people and nature. Maybe it’s just economic, there’s less small-scale farmers hungry for land.

A lot of projections now estimate a peak in human population by the 2050s. The whole planet’s TFR is around replacement rate and falling.

What are your thoughts on these potential shifts in human population? Intersecting with the renewables revolution and the end of the hydrocarbon age and American hegemony and climate change heating up. How do these play into each other?

It’s a big question. I think one element of all of this which we haven’t touched on is actually food production. Obviously for centuries as the world’s population has expanded, people have imagined that we might run out of food, and we haven’t.

Actually, human ingenuity, improved agricultural techniques and all kinds of other things, have managed to keep food production growing even faster than the growing population.

Now, I think the climate crisis makes this harder. But also, and I think this is very important, there’s the changes of habits. Particularly China and to a lesser extent India, as people enter the middle class they want to eat meat. That, as you know, requires much larger inputs, larger areas of land and so on, so that even as global population growth is slowing down the amount of land needed, with the combination of changing habits and the climate crisis the amount of land needed to feed those people could increase.

At the same time, I mean, you mentioned Bulgaria. There are places where the population has shrunk and there will be rewilding and that, of course, has all kinds of positive impacts.

China, you know, the meat of choice is pork. The pigs that China feeds on are fed with soybeans grown in Brazil. That’s the current model. Now, the destruction of the Amazon is impacting not just the Amazon itself, but the neighboring areas in terms of the rainfall patterns and so on. So things like that are quite complicated.

I don’t foresee like a global famine or a food crisis like that, but certainly you have more competition and pressure at a global level.

There are other elements of this. Something I write about in the book is about rice. Ironically perhaps, because one thinks of it as a tropical plant, it doesn’t do very well in high temperatures. A big part of the calories consumed on Earth are consumed as rice. It’s completely part of the culture of food in Asia. You know, rice has almost a kind of mythical status. There’s no option where people say, well, we’ll stop eating rice, we’ll eat something else. That’s not going to happen.

Aren’t rice yields not falling, though? There was a great post by Dr. Hannah Ritchie. In 2025, most staple crops hit record high yields, including rice, at least globally.

By the Numbers

The world is on track for record harvests this year

It’s not uncommon for people to tell me that global food production is already collapsing due to climate change. They are then surprised to hear that we typically hit record harvests year after year (even as things get hotter…

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9 months ago · 204 likes · 100 comments · Hannah Ritchie

Yes, but over the long term trajectory there’s that combination of higher heat and higher extreme weather events. Very difficult for farmers, basically. China has this new food security strategy, and identified this issue that a lot of the core staples that Chinese consumers feed on face headwinds in a climate-adapted world.

Of course, there’s all kinds of things that can be done. New strains, things that do better in certain conditions. In Bangladesh they developed a strain of rice that that can that survives floods effectively! But I do think generally that the global food systems are going to see a lot of strain.

Mediterranean Europe is another good example of a very important agricultural zone, particularly for Europeans, where the climate is getting very hot and very dry. Add extreme weather events into that, and it just makes it harder for farmers to operate.

I’m actually really optimistic on food production. In 2020, like a fifth of Iowa’s corn crop was smacked down by a derecho, an inland super-storm. Since then they’ve started really rolling out a new corn strain, genetically modified so it’s much shorter, much more resilient, has a wider and stouter stem, and it’s just harder to knock over.

In Canada’s prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, they’re seeing much higher staple grain yields despite much more erratic weather, in part due to adoption of no-till practices, in part due to new strains, stuff like that.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: January 16, 2026

Canada is seeing record-high crop yields despite floods and droughts, thanks in large part to widespread adoption of no-till farming…

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5 months ago · 32 likes · 6 comments

Given the immense ongoing demand for it and the high pressure to innovate, I suspect that food yields will stay pretty solid even despite climate headwinds. What do you think of that hypothesis?

I think it’s perfectly possible because in the end, there are lots of examples of humanity finding ways to adapt, finding ways to deal with the challenges of the shifting climate. We haven’t talked about intensive indoor farming hydroponics all that kind of stuff. So there are many possibilities. But it’s certainly the case that if you look at for example productivity in Brazil, certain areas are facing these headwinds.

And yes, it may be that they can shift. They’ll find new ways to handle it. But a heating world with more extreme weather events is generally, I think, quite challenging for farmers.

I agree. I just think there’s a lot of really interesting innovation that could counterbalance that or more than counterbalance that.

What question should I have asked that I didn’t ask? The meta-question. What do you want to answer that you haven’t been able to speak about that you think is important to share?

That’s great.

I mean, we’ve covered a load of ground. It’s been a really fascinating conversation.

I think the one area we haven’t talked about is the Arctic, and that’s a big part of the book. Obviously, there is a climate crisis, and there’s an ecological tragedy of the shift of the polar ice cap and the possibility that in the next decade, in summer that will break up and that ice cap which has been there for tens of thousands of years won’t be there.

Of course that makes very significant shifts in maritime opportunities and shipping routes. There’s the economic opportunity that you can ship something quicker from Asia to Europe or to North America. But of course that in itself has a climate impact because it’s a shorter route. You’re expending less energy to ship commodities or manufactured goods or whatever around the world. I think that’s another really big part of this story.

Where in the world would you expect borders to change the most in the next 20, 30 or 50 years?

The Sahel? Maritime jurisdictions in the Arctic?

The norms on sort of major territorial shifts seem to be eroding. Where do you think are potential future instances of that?

I mean, that’s a great question because the pace of change at the moment is just bewildering. Just for example, it might be the case that the Strait of Hormuz is going to turn into a kind of toll booth operated jointly by Iran and the United States!President Trump was talking about that as a distinct possibility. Now, that upends literally centuries of standard practice in international maritime law.

Not all doom

The End of Capitalism?

In the bewildering chaos of Trump’s war on Iran, there has been little attention to what may have been a throwaway remark of his, but one which has profound implications. In an interview on 8 April with ABC News (ie, before the collapse of the Islamabad talks) Trump was asked about the Iranian blockage of the Straits of Hormuz. This has become, as we’re…

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2 months ago · 53 likes · Arthur Snell

Cosmographia

IS THIS THE END OF FREE SEAS?

Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter uncovering the deep roots of a turbulent world. For the full map of posts, see here…

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2 months ago · 41 likes · 9 comments · M. E. Rothwell

I’m slightly ducking the question, but the pace of change is so dramatic that I think that the idea of state sovereignty appears to be breaking down.

We’re entering a new age of empires.

Obviously we’ve talked a lot about America, but you see it on a regional basis. For example a country like Turkey feels that it can intervene in Syria or Iraq if it feels threatened or if it senses that there’s some activity, you know, relating perhaps to a Kurdish minority, and it doesn’t feel the need to seek permission from anyone to do that.

So I think this age of imperial behavior is not limited just to one or two great powers. We see kind of middle powers operating in that way as well.

And I think what the climate crisis does in this context is because it renders wider global norms less stable, whether we’re talking about mass migration, whether we’re talking about increased conflict, whether we’re talking about conflict over resources, it just contributes, I would say, as a catalyst to this wider destabilization.

What do you think are the odds for more positive models emerging from that?

We’ve already seen that the European Union has really emerged as a more coherent blocking in recent years, with common defense provisions for Ukraine and stuff like that, in part due to America’s unreliability and abandonment.

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America's Weakness, Europe's Strength

The release of America’s new National Security Strategy has, unsurprisingly, occasioned an alarmed response in Europe. The document is negative and regressive, an unapologetic America First manifesto that blames the USA’s ills on “mass migration” and an elite class obsessed with “globalism” and “free trade”: things that were once celebrated by the Repu…

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6 months ago · 205 likes · 1 comment · Arthur Snell

And in 2026, a bunch of European countries sent troops to Greenland to deter American invasion, which would have been an unthinkable state of affairs not that long ago.

Do you think that more European Union-type broadly peaceful groupings might form to counter this age of empires, with more small countries forming transnational unions to support each other in these times?

Yeah, I think it’s quite possible, because ultimately countries behave rationally in order to protect themselves and their interests. And ultimately, the European Union grew out of countries wanting to make conflict impossible in the European continent.

You gave some great examples there. Ukraine, Greenland, and of course, it’s not just Europe. If powerful sort of hegemonic countries are going to behave in a certain way, you are also just as likely to see less powerful countries try to create the circumstances in which they can pool their sovereignty, defense, economic resources and so on in order to give themselves a better ability to protect themselves.

And so I would say that as much as you see a new age of instability and crisis, you also see a new age of collaboration.

Well, that is a brilliant note to end on. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Mr. Snell.

I’m hoping to go to East Africa shortly if jet fuel remains available. To write from Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, as I did from China recently. So I’ll probably publish this from East Africa in a couple weeks.

Amazing! Well, safe travels. Thank you. I’ll be following with interest.

Thank you so much.

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On April 24, I woke up to my second day of this reporting journey, left my Airbnb, had breakfast, and set off with great excitement to visit one of the most fascinating projects I’d ever gotten to write about: Rwanda’s world-leading network of life-saving Zipline medical delivery drones!

But on the way, Kigali presented new occasions that demanded to be written about first. Literally while waiting for a city-crossing electric bus at the bus stop, I saw a guy on an electric motorcycle from pioneering Rwandan startup Ampersand, right in front of a sign selling solar panels, and just had to snap a photo.

Soon after getting into that bus, we passed a Spiro solar-powered battery-swap station for electric motorbikes and a little independent repair shop advertising itself as an EV mechanic.

I got off at the teeming vortex of Nyabugogo Bus Station, Kigali’s central whirl of transport. There, I saw a multitude of electric buses amid the throng of people, yet found that the new bus that I wanted was still an old diesel model — for now. Kigali bus fleet electrification is moving fast.

As I bought my ticket and then waited for my bus to fill and leave, three middle-aged men came and asked for money. One was missing a leg, one a hand, and one an arm up to his shoulder. I thought it all too probable that they were survivors of the 1994 genocide, and gave each one a small sum in Rwandan francs.

As we traversed the urban periphery, I spotted many signs of Chinese culture: hanzi characters on the buses themselves and villagers’ T-shirts, a truck branded CHENG TONG, a wall with painted Chinese and Rwandan flags announcing that Chinese company StarTimes had provided satellite TV access to 10,000 villages. (This last is controversial). Once out beyond the city, the general landscape was like a rural version of the Kigali street scene: developing country on the way up, with sturdy metal-roofed buildings dotting the green fields.

Upon arrival at the bus stop in the Muhonga district, I got off into a thriving little town and started walking towards the Zipline point on Google Maps. Throughout today's bus journey into rural Rwanda, I’d had consistent 4G cellular data coverage. Along the way, I smiled at the sight of a piece of American culture: a little photo-printing business with a sign reading WAKANDA STUDIO.

I also noticed a compound with a rooftop solar array where the only English words on the signs I saw were “Rwandan Ministry of Health” and “Reception” in front of a line of visitors. I concluded that I had just passed, by happenstance, a solar-powered rural hospital.

A tour group from the University of Rwanda was departing via bus just as I arrived at the Zipline Muhanga drone base. A van in the parking lot bore the Zipline logo and the quote “The Best Delivery Service Not On Earth.” I said hi to the security folks at the gate, explained why I was there and showed my email thread with the Zipline office in the U.S., and they called out the director, an awesome guy named Prosper. I said that I didn’t wish to disturb his work and that I would be happy just to be let in to take some pictures of drone launches, but he kindly offered to give me a full tour!

First, we went to “mission control,” a room of screens and maps. One huge wall map showed all flight routes from this base, and one screen showed live tracking of all the drones currently in the air. This one Zipline base sends drones to over 1,000 health center drop points, hospitals and clinics across the western half of Rwanda. Their longest regularly supply flight is to Mibilizi, near the Congolese border. Before Zipline, it had taken seven to eight hours for someone to drive to Mibilizi to resupply their medical center. (And then, of course, that person had to drive seven to eight hours back). Now, Zipline drones have cut resupply time to Mibilizi, from order to delivery, to just 45 minutes. Less for everywhere else.

The map room also answered my half-thought question of why the major Zipline drone bases were hours away from Kigali: the international airport in the capital had a no-fly zone around it. Zipline coordinates closely with Rwanda’s civil aviation authority, and new low-altitude options are being planned for future Kigali flights.

I asked Prosper if storms could ground their flights, and he simply replied “We fly in any conditions. That is why we are here.” I could hear the buzz of drones taking off on the other side of the building as we talked.

Next, we visited a brief airlock-like antechamber where we covered our shoes with disposable stockings to avoid contamination, then entered the base’s medical supplies warehouse. There were medications for malaria, HIV, and many other ailments, a fridge full of blood plasma, a fridge full of red blood cells, a fridge full of platelets with little agitator racks to keep them constantly moving. Many fridges full of vaccines. Neatly stacked piles of empty Zipline drone packages ready to be filled at one of the workstations.

Zipline Muhanga now stocked over 300 different medical products and supplies, and was ready to send them zooming over the countryside to provide succor to those in need at a moment’s notice. Prosper held one example up for my inspection: a carton of Lumerax, a 3-day course malaria treatment for children. He told me that he had first joined a newly-launched Zipline intending to only work there for two years, but that he had found the work deeply meaningful and he had now been on the team for ten years. “At launch, there’s someone lying on a bed waiting for this drone. The idea is simple but the impact is huge.”

As we walked on, Prosper rattled off the statistics with justified pride. Since the Muhanga drone base had begun its work in this region of Rwanda, maternal deaths from postpartum hemorrhage were reduced by 51% in just the first three years, thanks to Zipline rapid blood delivery.

Blood expiry, the wastage of precious donor transfusions because they expired before a hospital had an occasion to use them, was down by 67%. Immunization rates were up. They’ve expanded into animal health as well as human health, benefiting farmers in the region1.

Rwandan immunization officials could now track the roll-out of new human (and animal) vaccination campaigns in real time with Zipline data, and no longer had to improvise a cold chain by piggybacking on restaurant freezers. In their early days, Zipline delivered special fortified food supplements to fight malnutrition, but malnutrition in Rwanda has declined so much that that’s no longer considered a necessary delivery item. And the existence of Zipline was a broad-spectrum boost to the economics of rural health centers. By avoiding waste, it also avoided redundancy, reduced the need to maintain expensive and fast-expiring stockpiles thanks to the certainty you could get what you needed quickly, and freed up money for clinics to invest in facility upgrades or more hires.

Zipline has 220 full-time employees in Rwanda, with 70 at the Muhanga base alone. (It’s a U.S. company, but all the employees I met were local Rwandans). That’s the directly drone-focused folks, not counting the large network of nurses and pharmacists involved in their supply chain and recipients. Jobs with Zipline were unsurprisingly prestigious, and Prosper told me they often hired young recent graduates with engineering experience. They’d also found it necessary to design their own internal “academy” system to train new hires in the many brand-new procedures Zipline had developed for their world-leading work. There was no such thing as gaining prior work experience in the rural African medical drone delivery field from another company (yet): Zipline had invented all this as they went along. Prosper explained that the entire operations area was optimized for efficiency. “One second per order saves hundreds of seconds per day.”

In the warehouse, I saw a Zipline technician lady (I think I caught her name as “Crystal”) receive an order and start the process of filling a drone package, which she graciously allowed me to record. They had two kinds of packages: a smaller one that carried two kilograms (about 4.4 pounds), and a larger one that carried 3.3 kilograms (about 7.3 pounds), the maximum recommended carrying capacity for their current drone models. Prosper told me that for the direst emergencies, like mothers’ postpartum hemorrhages or venomous snakebites, where someone was screaming in agony right now on a bed of pain and the drone was their only lifeline, they would always use the smaller package to shave even more precious seconds off the travel time for the drone carrying the sorely-needed blood plasma or antivenom serum. The loading I was watching now was not one of these cases; it was a resupply of treatment to counter H. pylori, the bacteria that caused stomach ulcers.

When she was done, Crystal placed the package in one of the two red hoppers (“Emergency” and “Resupply”) leading to the outdoors drone launch area, and a robotic voice started announcing “New shipment ready. New shipment ready.” On a loop, across the base, until the package was collected to be loaded onto a drone. Prosper led me back out of the warehouse zone and outside to follow.

I saw a landing before I saw a launch. A Zipline drone zoomed in from over the horizon, then its “tail” caught in a long catch-line stretched between two poles, and it fell like a hooked fish. Two Zipline employees rushed out to retrieve it and clear that landing area, reminding me of the racing car pit crews in the movie F1.

The launch was even more impressive. A crew member performed some final checks, set a drone on a catapult angled upwards, engaged the propellers with a deep thrumming sound, and then fired the drone into the sky to give it a head start on its journey. I saw a digital dashboard of daily flights in the area tick up from 249 to 250. Check out the video I took of the launches and landing!

The Zipline Muhanga operational baseline is launching a drone within five minutes of receiving an order for medical supplies! What I was seeing was nothing less than a fully functional just-in-time delivery system for blood transfusions and antivenom, reducing wastage and annihilating unavailability. Amazon Prime for saving human lives.

The drones themselves could go 210 kilometers round-trip on one full charge. Much of their fuselage was foam: cheap, light, and surprisingly resilient at high speeds. These “Zips” had a transient individual existence: they were all were made of interchangeable parts that snapped together like Legos, and were actually partially dismantled after every single landing and reassembled before every launch to check for and replace any potential damage.

Rows and rows of batteries were charging, to be swapped in with new wings, head, and tail pieces to form a new Zip drone when needed. The Electrotech Revolution at its finest. Maybe I’ve spent too much time thinking about energy technologies, but even though the batteries were far less visual striking than the drones, simply rows of cubes in charging cubbies with glowing LEDs, they entranced me. It positively warmed my heart to see all those electrons getting stored to power live-saving flight.

In addition to the batteries within each drone, Prosper explained that the facility is built for resilient energy supply in disasters. The Zipline Muhanga drone base is connected to the Rwandan grid, but also has a backup generator, and also also has a backup building-scale battery pack that can supply full power for six hours. There’s a third Zipline drone base set to open in Rwanda in Q3 2026, and that new one will be much more heavily solarized. For context, Prosper added that as a mode of transport for medical supplies, Zipline drones emit 97% less carbon dioxide than last-mile delivery using trucks. In addition, of course, to being unbothered by traffic or flooding and more than ten times faster to arrive, saving multitudes of human lives.

Since my arrival, the Muhanga base had seen drone launches and landings happening about once every two minutes, a dizzying progression of achievement. The air-speed velocity of an unladen drone was positively phenomenal: several times I tried to take pictures of an income drone just before its landing and literally couldn’t press the button fast enough to capture an image in the second-long window after the drone became visible but before it had already been “hooked.”

Prosper described this blistering pace of work as “slow.” There were apparently relatively few orders being placed at this time (early afternoon), with a speed-up apparently likely in a few hours’ time.

Eventually, Prosper was called away to another aspect of his work, and the tour was over. I stayed on the fringes of the building just watching and photographing the drone takeoffs and landings for a while, until the security guard politely but firmly told me that it was time for me to leave.

Humanity has created achieved many feats long believed to be only possible in the domain of myth and legend: flying across oceans, eradicating plagues, landing on the moon. Now, we’re building fleets of flying protectors that can carry the materials needed to save your life right to your sickbed in less than an hour. Perhaps the most salient difference I see between these drones and, say, the angels described in many religions, is that if you pray for one of these drones to help, there’s a high probability that you’ll soon see one coming with the help you asked for. The Zips are true “machines of loving grace,” operated by a crew of big damn heroes. I feel honored to have had this chance to help share the story of their noble endeavor.

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Prosper also told me that the Zipline Muhanga base stocks pig semen from five different breeds, and has so far delivered a total of over 70,000 units of pig semen to farmers across Rwanda. Each delivered unit could father eight to sixteen piglets.

Previously, Rwandan pig farmers wishing to improve their swine stock had to go fetch it themselves on motorcycles, which took hours and hours and often resulted in their sow going out of heat before they returned. The ripple effects for agricultural productivity - and thus, very directly, human health - must be enormous by now.

I’m personally a committed vegetarian, and I’ve long worked to promote plant-based and cell-based meat in developed countries, but until those cruelty-free protein sources follow the renewables track of becoming cheaper than the alternative, I would consider it deeply unethical to oppose improved access to vital macronutrients for human children in sub-Saharan Africa.

After an overnight flight, I landed at Kigali International Airport in the early morning of April 23, 2026. It was a partly cloudy day, pleasantly balmy at first and growing hotter towards midday, and I was incredibly excited to start this new reporting journey! I’d visited Madagascar and Morocco before, but this was my first time on mainland sub-Saharan Africa, a swathe of Earth increasingly central to humanity’s future. I was thrilled even at the early window-limited glimpses of Lake Victoria (aka Nyanza) from the plane window, and the rising green hills and red earth of Rwanda soon after.

The day started well. I asked for, paid for, and received an East Africa Tourist Visa, allowing “borderless” ninety-day travel through all three of Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, right away at passport control. Super easy, barely an inconvenience. I had read online that visa-on-arrival in Rwanda was the best point of entry for East Africa, and I can now add another testimonial in favor of their streamlined process.

This good impression continued as I walked out into the city, bearing my full trip inventory in my backpack, pockets, and a bandolier-like satchel. The air smelled clean, much less polluted than Mumbai or Mexico City or even New York at rush hour. The registration of new fossil fuel-powered motorbikes has been banned in Kigali since 2025, and I could already see a notably high proportion of electric vehicles on the road, from electric bike models to Yutong electric buses to snazzy-looking Chinese EV car marques ranging from the ubiquitous BYD to the obscure Trumpchi1.

Furthermore, there were power lines arcing overhead, consistently paved streets and sidewalks (though still open sewers in some areas) and omnipresent corrugated-iron roofs on even the smallest dwellings, a big step up in sturdiness and resilience from the branches or bamboo I’d often seen in Madagascar. Kigali looked prosperous.

I also noticed lots of new construction underway, with new apartment buildings going up left and right. Rwanda actually has a brand-new digital permit system for housing construction that lets people file, submit, and track their permits in a self-guided process online — an African case study of one fascinating win-win “Abundance” policy of the sort promoted by the emerging YIMBY movement in the United States.

Another example of an emerging ecomodernist “solarpunk urbanism” aesthetic was Kigali’s leadership in urban wetland parks, which I’d previously written about for my newsletter. The first template, the Nyandungu Urban Wetland Eco-Tourism Park, was conveniently located within walking distance of the airport (not a given, as Kigali is a poly-centric metropolis spread out over many hills) so that was my first stop on my first morning in Rwanda.

Nyandungu is a long, thin ribbon of wetland, rivulets, and vegetation surrounded by urban development, and its official emergence as a park, with accompanying tourist infrastructure, was only completed in July 2022. It’s not even four years old; when I visited, the visitor center looked as if it had just been taken out of plastic wrap and a park restaurant in another area was still under construction. The hiking and biking trails were absolutely spotless, with people even sweeping fallen leaves off them. Nevertheless, despite its youth the Nyandungu project has already been deemed such a resounding success that the government now plans to restore and engineer another five wetland-parks like it across Kigali!

Walking in, I could see why. The park was a space of great joy and natural beauty, with liquid birdsong flowing out from every shrub and tree. I regularly heard evasive movements in the grass as I walked by, and once saw their originator, a lizard scurrying up a tree. Flowering plants in blue and pink and yellow and orange were scattered among the grid like leftover carnival beads on a shag carpet. Waterlilies ennobled the shadowy recesses of the ponds scattered throughout. I was the only person of visibly non-African descent I saw in the park, but there were many apparent locals just hanging out solo, in a couple, or as a family, enjoying the “nature bath” in the middle of the city. I saw a couple people actively bird-watching, including one guy with a gigantic camera.

I hardly recognized any of the birds myself, either by sound or by sight, and frantically took photos for future iNaturalist analysis. I learned later that I had likely spotted black-lored babblers, crested mousebirds, gray-backed fiscals, and an Ardea-genus heron similar to those I had seen in Europe, among the many, many more that I hadn’t been able to photograph.

And yet, all this had begun as a profoundly artificial space, with much human and machine work needed to restore a pristine affect. I could see the regular prints of machinery in some of the muddy channels going to and from the ponds. Its biodiversity and mental health benefits were real, but perhaps the ultimate deciding factor in their creation had been the utilitarian safety element, the climate-resilience shielding of permeable sponge-y wetland ecosystems to soak up floodwaters and greenery-provided evapotranspiration to counter the urban heat island effect. A lovely example of the quotidian realities of the successes we make in the Anthropocene.

Among the most common residents were the weaver birds, large songbirds with striking gold plumage common across much of tropical Africa. Brilliant citizen science app iNaturalist suggests that these were black-headed weavers, Ploceus melanocephalus, but they might have also included other weaver species in the genus.

Like the oropendolas of the New World, weaver birds are known (and named) for their intricately constructed nests, which are painstakingly assembled from strands of plant matter with only beaks and toes as manipulators yet can hold the weight of precious eggs and newborn young! As I was observing these feathered maestros go about their homesteading, I almost stepped into another example of extraordinary animal architecture: a small termite mound. It’s occasionally occurred to me that humans’ attitude towards such structures could provide a partial analogy for the Fermi Paradox. Hypothetical aliens might see our cities and space stations and ignore them as mere “instinctive behavior” like we do to the creations of ants and birds.

The weavers seemed to prefer some trees over other, perhaps for structural stability reasons or perhaps just for social togetherness. One tree besides one of the many ponds was absolutely festooned with weaver-bird nests, and I delighted in regarding it.

I briefly stopped at a recreation area on one edge of the park, observed a playground for children and even a painting station set up with brushes and easels (!), and played a few games of chess with one young Rwandan hanging out with a group of friends. As I walked out of the wetland area and back into the hilly, crowded streets in search of lunch, I reflected that any city, anywhere, would be proud to have Nyandungu among its parks. An impressive achievement for such a young, fast-growing capital as Kigali.

In the nearly thirty-two years since the abominable genocide of 1994, Rwanda has undergone rapid and profound changes in essentially every area of life. (Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame has been in government for all of that time, and formal president himself since 2000, leading to him often being cited as an example of a successful “developmentalist” dictator).

Per the ever-reliable Our World in Data, the fast-urbanizing population of Rwanda has nearly doubled since 2000 — on a relatively small amount of land, reaching a sky-high Rwandan population density of 576 people per square kilometer in 2023! (In the U.S. it’s 37.5, in France it’s 120). But Rwanda’s living conditions have improved much faster than the rate of population growth despite the space constraints, leading to major progress across key indicators of human flourishing. Rwandan life expectancy rose dramatically from 47.8 in 2000 to 67.8 in 2023. Child mortality has plummeted: 4.5% of Rwandan newborns now die before the age of 15, similar to the world average and down from a dreadful 22.9% in 2000. The share of Rwanda’s children accessing basic education (primary/elementary school) is now over 99%.

As of 2023, 64% of Rwandans had access to at least basic electricity (up from just 1% in 1997!), and that’s sure to be higher now as the country keeps growing. Not super impressive stats on a global scale, but very impressive both in terms of recent history (it and regional comparisons.

In fact, Rwanda’s achievements are particularly stark because Rwanda is one of the countries on Earth with the closest thing to a “control group” or “twin country” this side of North Korea and South Korea, so we have a “road not taken” benchmark to measure against. Rwanda’s southern neighbor Burundi is a very ethnically and culturally similar state, with a near-identical population size of around 14 million, that suffered very similar 1990s atrocities but has had much less competent2 autocrats in charge since then. In 2023, access to electricity in Burundi was just 12%, youth mortality rate was 6.6%. Access to basic education in 2020 was just below 80%. This wasn’t just a “rising tide lifts all boats” effect — Rwandans made smart choices, working hard on establishing the basics of modern technological civilization.

Rwanda has been categorized by the United Nations as a “Least Developed Country” (LDC) for its entire existence, but it met the graduation criteria in 2024. (It’ll likely “officially” graduate some years in the future, as that’s a political decision with impacts on WTO trade rules, not an automatic change). A few more decades like the last three, and it might be headed towards comfortable middle-income status.

This is, if you stop to think about it, a freaking amazing development! Rwanda has gone from being mentioned in the same breath as Somalia, a land of omnipresent violence, to being called Africa’s answer to Singapore, a beacon of technocratic governance successes3. It’s as if we were to find that Afghanistan thirty-two years in the feature is a shining example of gender equality, or that North Korea had developed a thriving and disputatious civil society. It really shows, yet again, that when the circumstances align we humans are capable of epic victories on a societal scale.

As I began writing these words on the evening of the 23rd, rain was pounding down on Kigali — it is the rainy season, after all, and in East Africa that often means several intense bursts of rain per day. It’s nighttime now, and I’m getting tired (so excuse any typos!). I’ll schedule this article to go out tomorrow, and I’m already excited for learning more about Rwanda tomorrow!

This newsletter is going on a new reporting journey around East Africa! It’s essentially in the spirit of my previous trips around the Netherlands, India, Mexico, and China. I plan to travel through three countries, Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, and write articles along the way. I’ll land in Kigali, Rwanda on April 23, and should depart from Nairobi, Kenya in mid-May. I’m really excited to explore this part of the planet!

In terms of article frequency, I’m thinking that this trip will be a hybrid model between the two extremes of my publishing cadence from Mexico (five in-person reporting articles over three months, interspersed among ongoing regular posts for The Weekly Anthropocene and Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope) and my publishing cadence from China (an article each day for eleven days replacing all other posts, which was a fun challenge but super intense). This will be the last weekly news roundup until I’m back from East Africa in late May, but I will intersperse some Daily Dose posts and at least one already-done interview among my ongoing field reports!

In my recent reporting journey around China, I was visiting only publicly viewable areas (except for that one time), as despite my best efforts I hadn’t been able to arrange any in-person interviews or worksite visits. For this East Africa trip, I’ve been luckier in beforehand arrangements, and I should be able to visit and report on several fascinating organizations’ work sites in person!

Rwanda infamously suffered a heinous genocide in 1994, but has since experienced an extraordinary development trajectory. The 21st century so far has seen rapid progress on healthcare, sanitation, education, women’s rights, economic development, and much more. From being one of the most violent places in the world in the 1990s, Rwanda is now sometimes described as an African Singapore. The capital, Kigali, is ranked as one of the safest cities on the continent and has become a regional leader in electric urban mobility and urban wetland parks.