As Cop17 kicks off, records since 1921 show more bee species declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alps
Most of Europe’s wild bee species and about half of its hover fly species have declined over the last century, a study has found, as a UN biodiversity summit begins in Armenia.
Records since 1921 show more bee species are declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alpine region. The richness of bee and hover fly species suffered a persistent drop in the Atlantic and Continental regions, the study found, though trends in other regions were mixed or even positive.
Belgium’s three regions have reached an agreement with the European Commission to strengthen measures against water pollution, improve wastewater treatment and increase protection against floods and droughts.
The joint statement, signed in Leuven on Monday, 19th October, sets out commitments for Flanders, Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region, including action on industrial pollution, pesticides and persistent chemicals such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS.
The agreement was signed by European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy Jessika Roswall, Flemish Environment Minister Jo Brouns, Walloon Environment Minister Yves Coppieters and Brussels State Secretary Ans Persoons.
According to the European Commission’s announcement, the agreement follows a detailed examination of Belgium’s implementation of European water legislation and identifies measures requiring greater attention from regional authorities.
European Commission seeks faster implementation
Belgium is the second EU Member State to complete a structured dialogue under a Commission initiative launched in November 2025.
The process is intended to improve implementation of existing environmental requirements rather than establish an entirely new legislative framework.
European water legislation already obliges Member States to assess the condition of their rivers and groundwater, control pollution and prepare management plans intended to improve water quality.
However, achieving the objectives of the EU’s Water Framework Directive remains difficult in several countries, particularly where pollution, agricultural activity and urban development place competing demands on water resources.
Belgium presents additional administrative complications because responsibility for environmental policy and water management is divided principally between three regional governments.
Watercourses also cross regional and international boundaries, requiring cooperation with neighbouring countries.
The Commission’s review examined Belgium’s third generation of river basin management plans and its second generation of flood risk management plans.
Technical discussions identified areas where implementation could be accelerated, particularly regarding pollution controls, water efficiency and coordination between public authorities.
Flanders to address industrial pollution
Under the agreement, Flanders will prioritise investment in water resilience and stronger action against industrial pollution.
The region intends to use its IMPULSE programme to support improvements in water management and pollution reduction.
Industrial discharges are among the issues specifically identified for closer scrutiny.
The joint statement calls for more systematic reviews of permits governing water abstraction and industrial wastewater discharges, particularly where existing activities place pressure on rivers and groundwater.
The agreement also highlights the need to tackle persistent chemical pollution.
PFAS have become a significant environmental concern because many of these substances degrade extremely slowly and can accumulate in water, soil and living organisms.
Certain PFAS compounds have been associated with adverse health effects, although the risks depend on the individual chemical, exposure level and duration.
The Commission’s commitments include stronger action on PFAS and pesticides, alongside improvements in monitoring and pollution prevention.
Agricultural pollution is another area requiring attention.
Fertilisers and pesticides can enter rivers and groundwater through runoff or infiltration, creating difficulties for water treatment and contributing to the deterioration of aquatic ecosystems.
The three regions have agreed to strengthen cooperation with farmers, retailers and researchers to support more sustainable agricultural practices, including expanding markets for organic products.
€300 million for river restoration in Wallonia
Wallonia has committed to continuing investment in river restoration and improved water resilience, with particular attention to the Vesdre basin.
The region intends to use a €300 million loan secured from the European Investment Bank in 2025 to support restoration work.
The Vesdre basin experienced severe flooding in July 2021, when widespread destruction across eastern Belgium exposed weaknesses in flood protection and the management of vulnerable river valleys.
Restoration measures can include improving river channels, reconnecting floodplains and using natural systems to retain water during periods of heavy rainfall.
The regional authorities also intend to support industrial companies investing in water-efficient production technologies and environmental innovation.
These measures are intended to reduce pressure on water resources while helping businesses adapt to changing environmental requirements.
Wallonia has additionally committed to supporting cleaner agricultural practices, consistent with the wider national objective of reducing pollution from fertilisers and pesticides.
Brussels focuses on wastewater treatment
The Brussels-Capital Region will concentrate on improving water governance and wastewater treatment.
Urban wastewater infrastructure is particularly important in densely populated areas, where drainage networks and treatment facilities must accommodate domestic sewage, commercial activity and rainfall.
Heavy precipitation can place additional pressure on combined sewer systems, potentially increasing the risk of untreated or insufficiently treated wastewater entering natural watercourses.
Improving treatment capacity and water management requires investment in infrastructure, monitoring and coordination between the authorities responsible for sanitation and environmental protection.
The Brussels commitments therefore form part of the wider European effort to modernise urban wastewater systems and improve the ecological condition of rivers passing through major cities.
Cross-border water management
The agreement also identifies the need for closer cooperation in the Scheldt and Meuse river basins.
Both river systems cross national boundaries, making their management dependent on coordination between Belgium and neighbouring countries.
Regional governments have committed to supporting the restoration of floodplains and the removal of barriers affecting shared watercourses where appropriate.
The measures are intended to improve the condition of aquatic ecosystems while strengthening natural protection against floods and droughts.
The Commission will support Belgium through initiatives under the European Water Resilience Strategy, including research, digital technologies, technical expertise and assistance in mobilising public and private investment.
However, the joint statement signed in Leuven does not itself establish a new binding regulatory regime or guarantee that all the investments identified will be financed.
Its importance will depend on whether the three regional governments translate their commitments into funded projects, revised permits and measurable improvements in water quality.
For the European Commission, Belgium’s agreement is also part of a wider programme of structured discussions with Member States on compliance with EU water legislation. Further national dialogues are expected as Brussels seeks to improve implementation across the Union.
At least three people have died in severe flooding across eastern Spain after Storm Adam brought extraordinary rainfall to the Mediterranean coast, forcing thousands from their homes and leaving residents stranded on rooftops as emergency services struggled to reach inundated communities.
The worst flooding struck parts of Valencia and Alicante, where swollen rivers overwhelmed roads, flooded residential districts and disrupted transport. Authorities ordered residents of 145 municipalities to remain indoors as rescue operations continued on Monday, 19th October.
The disaster has revived memories of the October 2024 floods, which killed more than 230 people in the Valencia region and prompted widespread criticism of the authorities’ emergency warnings and response.
Thousands evacuated as rivers burst their banks
The coastal town of Oliva, in Valencia province, was among the worst affected areas. Approximately 2,000 people were evacuated from seven campsites as floodwaters spread through low-lying neighbourhoods, while residents elsewhere sought refuge on upper floors and rooftops.
According to reports from the Spanish news agency EFE, emergency crews were reinforced by Spain’s Military Emergencies Unit, whose personnel were deployed from their base at Bétera to assist local firefighters and rescue teams.
Helicopters were used to reach people trapped by the rising water. Roads became impassable, vehicles were swept away and several settlements were temporarily isolated as streams and drainage channels overflowed.
The scale of the rainfall was exceptional even for a region accustomed to intense autumn storms. In parts of Valencia and Alicante, precipitation approached 700 litres per square metre over approximately 48 hours, equivalent to 700 millimetres of rain.
Pego, in neighbouring Alicante province, recorded more than 600 millimetres within approximately 36 hours, placing considerable pressure on local waterways and drainage infrastructure.
Fatalities and emergency restrictions
Two women died during the weekend, including one swept away by floodwaters near Cabrera de Mar, north of Barcelona, and another whose body was recovered near Sagunto, in Valencia.
A third woman was found dead inside a flooded property in Oliva during rescue operations on Monday. Separately, a 64-year-old man died after suffering a heart attack at a flooded campsite in the same town, according to EFE’s account of the incident.
The regional authorities activated level-two emergency arrangements, enabling additional resources to be mobilised as local services confronted the consequences of prolonged rainfall.
At the height of the emergency, stay-at-home restrictions covered approximately 800,000 people. These measures were subsequently eased in many municipalities, although restrictions remained in force in particularly exposed districts.
Schools were closed in affected areas, roads were blocked and rail services disrupted. The situation remained particularly difficult where floodwaters had entered homes, commercial premises and tourist accommodation.
Renewed examination of emergency preparedness
Storm Adam has inevitably drawn comparisons with the disaster of October 2024, when catastrophic flooding in eastern Spain exposed serious weaknesses in emergency communication, evacuation procedures and coordination between public authorities.
That earlier disaster generated disputes over responsibility between regional and national institutions, particularly concerning the timing of warnings and the deployment of rescue resources.
The latest flooding places those questions back on the political agenda. Spain’s decentralised administrative structure gives regional governments substantial responsibility for civil protection, while the central government can provide military assistance and additional emergency resources.
The deployment of the Military Emergencies Unit demonstrates how rapidly local incidents can require national intervention when extreme rainfall affects several municipalities simultaneously.
The challenge extends beyond issuing weather warnings. Authorities must determine whether warnings reach vulnerable residents, whether evacuation routes remain accessible and whether emergency personnel can intervene before flooding becomes dangerous.
In communities close to rivers, floodplains and coastal drainage systems, these decisions become particularly consequential when rainfall accumulates over a short period.
European implications of repeated flooding
The disaster also raises questions about infrastructure investment and the application of European flood-risk legislation.
Under the EU’s Floods Directive, Member States are required to assess flood risks, prepare hazard maps and develop management plans designed to reduce the consequences for human health, economic activity and the environment.
Those obligations require national and regional authorities to identify vulnerable areas and consider preventive measures, including land-use planning, flood defences and emergency preparedness.
Extreme rainfall does not produce the same consequences everywhere. The effects depend partly on local geography, drainage capacity, urban development and the condition of waterways.
Meteorological warnings had also extended towards Catalonia as the weather system moved northwards, creating additional concern in areas where saturated ground could increase the risk of further flooding.
For the affected municipalities, the immediate priorities remain the completion of rescue operations, restoration of essential services and assessment of damage to homes, roads and businesses.
The longer-term examination will concern whether the emergency arrangements and infrastructure improvements undertaken since the 2024 disaster were sufficient to reduce the consequences of another major autumn storm.
Four years ago nearly every government on Earth agreed to protect nature. Now, as countries gather for Cop17, the pressure is on to follow through on those commitments
Passersby could smell the dead fish before they saw them. In August, more than 3,000 pike, roach, carp and rudd were found lifeless along the River Wensum in Norwich. Some gasped for air in their final moments, desperate for the oxygen that heatwave conditions had depleted in the water. Investigators believe that the die-off was triggered by heavy rainfall that flushed through high concentrations of pollution at a time when wildlife were already struggling.
The 45-mile (70km) chalk river is one of about 250 in the country. They are a geological accident almost unique to Britain – and one of Earth’s rarest habitats. They emerge from chalk aquifers and are home to species such as freshwater shrimp, otters and stoneflies, also providing drinking water for millions of people. But just 11 have formal protection, with many ravaged by sewage pollution and overextraction. The Norfolk river is one of the few that does have legal protection, but it is in poor ecological health.
The production of organic, free-range eggs can have a climate impact nearly twice as great as that of eggs produced by caged hens. This is according to a new study published in the scientific journal *Royal Society Open Science*, as reported by the British newspaper *The Guardian*. The analysis indicates that if the entire egg […]
Warning for other Arctic communities as residents told not to use water in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, one of the fastest-warming places in the world
Residents of a remote town in Norway that is in one of the fastest-warming places in the world have been told they must no longer drink tap water due to heavy metal contamination that scientists have linked to the thawing permafrost.
Longyearbyen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, gets its main drinking water supply from a 1.5 mile-long (2.5km) dammed lake called Isdammen, or “ice pond”. Higher temperatures as a result of the climate crisis have thawed permafrost, leading to newly exposed bedrock leaching metals into the pond.
This month, nearly every country on Earth will return to the question of how to stem the rapid destruction of the natural world. Humans are driving it, but so far we have not found a way to stop it.
In late 2022, governments reached an ambitious once-in-a-decade deal to better protect nature amid scientific warnings that the planet is going through the largest loss of life since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now, they are assessing their progress on the targets for the first time.
Spar pilot scheme will test whether heirloom fruit can thrive in today’s commercial and environmental conditions
Only about 10 of the 2,000 types of apples growing in Austria can be found in supermarkets among the polished, pristine fruit usually on display – a sad ratio according to fans of historic varieties being primed for a comeback.
One of the country’s biggest retail chains has embarked on a pilot rollout of unusual and long-forgotten apples enjoyed in previous centuries, riding an international trend of reviving heirloom fruit and vegetables.
America's interminable war with Iran has killed thousands, disrupted commerce that flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and raised prices on the home front.
But there may be one silver lining. In an attempt to lower gas prices that spiked because of the war, the Trump administration has repeatedly issued waivers of the Jones Act, a century-old law that requires all goods moved between American ports to be carried on American-built, American-crewed ships.
With the law (temporarily) not being enforced, commerce has exploded.
Just look at how much propane has been shipped from the mainland United States to Puerto Rico, says Colin Grabow, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute and perhaps the nation's foremost advocate for abolishing the Jones Act.
America is one of the world's leading producers and exporters of propane, but the lack of Jones Act–compliant ships capable of carrying gas means that it has been nearly impossible to ship propane from the mainland to outlying parts of the country. In the past, Puerto Rico has imported gas from Nigeria, Chile, and elsewhere because those deliveries don't have to comply with the Jones Act.
For years, libertarians have argued that the Jones Act unfairly impoverishes American consumers and businesses that want to buy and sell things within the same country in order to artificially inflate the price of moving those things across water. Waiving the law seems to have proven that point: There are plenty of ships capable of moving gas and oil around the country as long as the government gets out of the way.
"The instant the Jones Act no longer applied to energy shipments, mainland propane displaced foreign imports, suggesting it had been the cheapest option all along," says Grabow.
Puerto Rico is hardly the only winner.
The Jones Act waivers are offering a glimpse into a world where the law doesn't exist. From March through mid-August, there had been 210 voyages completed that otherwise would have been deemed unlawful without the waivers, according to an analysis of Maritime Administration data by the Institute for Energy Research.
It's a world where American oil and natural gas can be more easily shipped from the Gulf Coast to New England, which had previously been importing energy from Russia and Europe. Another big winner is California, which had been importing gasoline from as far away as the Bahamas because it was nearly impossible to legally ship gas from Texas or Alaska to the West Coast.
President Donald Trump reupped the Jones Act waiver in mid-May. Another extension, issued in August, will last for 90 days but applies only to ships carrying energy products such as gas and oil. Before that waiver expires in November, lawmakers ought to kill the Jones Act permanently.
There is some irony in the fact that one of Trump's most successful policy maneuvers has paused a protectionist law that limited commerce, when so much else of his economic policy has been focused on erecting barriers to trade. It's also amusing that it was a war in the Middle East—something Trump pledged to avoid—that triggered this change.
Still, the proof is in the shipping. The free traders were right all along.
Italy and five other member states have failed to secure a further postponement of the EU’s new carbon market for heating and transport fuels, although European leaders have ordered a fresh assessment of its impact on households and businesses.
European Union leaders have resisted demands for another postponement of carbon pricing for road transport and building fuels, exposing deep disagreements over climate policy, industrial competitiveness and the burden of energy costs on European households.
At the European Council summit in Brussels on 15–16 October, the Visegrad countries — Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — pressed for the second European Emissions Trading System, known as ETS2, to be delayed until 2030. Italy and Greece joined calls for greater flexibility over carbon costs, although Rome also sought a national exemption from aspects of the energy-price regime rather than simply a uniform delay. No further postponement was agreed.
The European Council conclusions call on the European Commission to update its assessment of ETS2, particularly its design and safeguards. Leaders also demanded action to reduce volatility in the existing carbon market and limit the effect of carbon prices on electricity costs.
The outcome stops short of the further postponement sought by several governments, but demonstrates how far energy affordability has moved towards the centre of European climate negotiations.
The growing rebellion over ETS2
ETS2 is designed to extend the principle of carbon pricing to fuels used for heating buildings, road transport and certain smaller industrial activities. Unlike the existing Emissions Trading System, which covers large industrial installations and power generation, the new mechanism reaches sectors closely connected to everyday household expenditure.
Under the scheme, fuel suppliers must purchase allowances corresponding to the emissions associated with the fuels they sell. Households and motorists will not buy allowances themselves, but suppliers may pass those additional costs through to customers.
That distinction is fundamental. A policy designed to encourage investment in cleaner heating systems and vehicles may initially appear to consumers as an increase in petrol, diesel and domestic heating bills.
The current legislative timetable provides for ETS2 to become operational in 2028, following an earlier one-year postponement. The latest demands from several Central European governments would push that date back to 2030.
Their argument is that consumers and smaller businesses cannot reasonably be expected to absorb another source of energy-price pressure while European economies continue to contend with geopolitical uncertainty, expensive fuel and comparatively weak industrial competitiveness.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has been particularly outspoken in his criticism, arguing that carbon pricing risks weakening Europe’s industrial base and making everyday life more expensive.
Italy has supported calls for greater flexibility, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni presenting the discussion as part of a wider attempt to restore competitiveness and make the transition more affordable.
Why other governments opposed another delay
The initiative encountered resistance from governments concerned that repeatedly postponing established climate legislation would weaken investment certainty and reduce confidence in European policy.
The Nordic member states have been particularly reluctant to reopen the timetable. Their position reflects a broader concern that businesses investing in clean technologies need credible long-term rules, rather than legislation liable to be revised whenever political opposition intensifies.
Carbon pricing is intended to change economic incentives gradually. Higher costs for carbon-intensive fuels are supposed to make alternatives such as better-insulated buildings, electric vehicles and cleaner heating more financially attractive.
Critics of further postponement argue that delaying implementation would also delay those incentives, potentially increasing the eventual cost of reaching the Union’s emissions-reduction targets.
Yet the opposition has exposed a weakness in that argument: consumers cannot always respond quickly to price signals. A household relying on an older heating system or a worker with no practical alternative to driving may face higher costs long before affordable low-carbon options become available.
That issue has been central to earlier discussions over ETS2. EU Today reported on stronger carbon-price safeguards in June, when European institutions moved to provide additional market intervention if allowance prices rose sharply.
Commission ordered to reassess the economic impact
Rather than endorsing a new delay, European leaders have asked the Commission to review ETS2’s economic impact and safeguards.
The summit also urged faster progress on adjustments to the Market Stability Reserve, the mechanism intended to help manage the supply of carbon allowances and prevent excessive price volatility.
Under the existing scheme, market interventions can increase or reduce allowance availability in response to defined conditions. For ETS2, safeguards are especially politically sensitive because the cost of carbon allowances may ultimately be reflected in household transport and heating expenditure.
That timetable gives governments a relatively narrow window to settle the remaining political disputes and put protective measures into effect.
A central part of the response is the Social Climate Fund, intended to support vulnerable households, transport users and small businesses through investments in energy efficiency, cleaner heating, improved transport and temporary financial assistance.
The central practical question is whether such assistance reaches consumers quickly enough to offset rising costs, particularly in member states where incomes are lower and households remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Climate commitments meet industrial reality
The ETS2 dispute is connected to a broader argument over Europe’s existing carbon market and its effects on energy-intensive industries.
Manufacturers already face substantial costs arising from electricity, fuel, regulatory requirements and international competition. Governments concerned about deindustrialisation argue that European climate policy must account more directly for these pressures.
The summit conclusions acknowledged those concerns by demanding a predictable carbon market that limits price volatility and protects industry against the relocation of production to jurisdictions with less demanding environmental rules.
At the same time, leaders reaffirmed the importance of maintaining carbon pricing as an incentive for investment and emissions reduction.
For the governments seeking a postponement, the Commission’s new assessment offers an opportunity to maintain pressure for further concessions. For governments defending the existing timetable, it provides an alternative to another politically damaging delay.
The immediate result is therefore a compromise over scrutiny rather than a change in law. ETS2 remains scheduled for 2028, while Brussels must demonstrate that its safeguards can withstand both market volatility and political opposition.
The next phase will be determined less by arguments about long-term emissions targets than by the ability of EU institutions and national governments to show households and businesses how the transition can be financed without placing disproportionate costs on those least able to adjust.
Scientists can’t agree why reefs in the Red Sea have long been immune to bleaching. The answer could be the key to saving these tough corals as climate change begins taking its toll.
Vedanta’s push for bauxite mining in Odisha’s Niyamgiri Hill appears to be gathering momentum, with the State government’s backing. But claims that local communities have approved the project appear dubious at best.
Nearly 183,000 giant tortoises inhabit the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles. This is the highest number ever recorded for the species and the result of decades of conservation efforts. A new study shows that the population is healthy and remains relatively stable, though scientists warn that climate change and invasive animals continue to threaten its […]
The European Commission has proposed postponing new methane reporting and verification obligations for fossil-fuel imports by one year, responding to pressure from energy suppliers and member states amid disruption to global oil and gas markets.
The European Commission has proposed delaying key methane emissions requirements for imported oil, gas and coal by one year, acknowledging that the present energy crisis could make the original timetable difficult to enforce without threatening Europe’s fuel supplies.
The legislative proposal presented on 14th October would postpone obligations requiring importers to demonstrate that their overseas suppliers meet monitoring, reporting and verification standards equivalent to those imposed on European producers.
The requirements were scheduled to take effect on 1st January 2027. Under the revised arrangements, compliance would begin in 2028, with the first annual demonstrations to national authorities due by 31st May 2029.
The decision follows months of pressure from European governments, American energy companies and importers concerned that the regulation could complicate contracts and restrict access to alternative supplies during a period of exceptional international disruption.
Energy security takes precedence
The Commission’s explanatory memorandum places the decision directly within the consequences of the Middle East conflict, which has disrupted trade through the Strait of Hormuz since February.
According to the Commission, approximately 20 per cent of global liquefied natural gas supplies and 25 per cent of seaborne oil trade have been affected. Alternative producers have only partially compensated for the interruption, leaving European buyers competing for increasingly expensive supplies.
Brussels acknowledges that the disruption is likely to continue affecting energy markets after the immediate crisis subsides, partly because damaged infrastructure will require time to repair and restart.
Under these circumstances, importers have warned that they may be unable to obtain sufficient fuel meeting the original compliance requirements by January.
The development follows wider discussions about Europe’s energy costs. As EU Today reported during the Brussels summit, high energy prices have become a central concern for governments attempting to protect European industrial competitiveness.
Washington presses for regulatory relief
The United States has been particularly concerned about the effect of the methane rules on transatlantic energy trade.
American producers have become increasingly important suppliers of liquefied natural gas to Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 accelerated the diversification of European energy imports.
According to the reporting on the Commission’s decision, American companies, including ExxonMobil, have raised objections to the requirements, while Washington has pressed Brussels to provide additional flexibility.
French President Emmanuel Macron has also expressed concern about the legal risks facing importers attempting to demonstrate compliance across complicated international supply chains.
The problem involves obtaining reliable emissions measurements from production facilities that may be located thousands of miles from Europe and operate under different regulatory systems.
European importers must then establish whether the information satisfies EU standards, even when the companies operating those facilities are not themselves subject to European jurisdiction.
For suppliers with several production sites, transport arrangements and intermediary contracts, collecting consistent and independently verified information can be a substantial undertaking.
Climate legislation remains in force
The Commission insists that the postponement does not represent an abandonment of its methane reduction objectives.
The original EU methane regulation entered into force in August 2024. It introduced requirements covering methane measurement, leak detection, reporting and restrictions on routine venting and flaring.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and emissions from oil and gas operations can arise through equipment leaks, deliberate releases and incomplete combustion.
The International Energy Agency estimates that more than 350 billion cubic metres of gas were lost globally through flaring, venting and leakage in 2024. Reducing those losses could increase the quantity of gas available for commercial use.
The Commission is therefore attempting to preserve its environmental objectives while allowing additional time for verification systems and national enforcement arrangements to become operational.
The proposal also postpones methane-intensity reporting obligations for EU producers and importers from August 2028 to August 2029. Requirements to demonstrate compliance with maximum methane-intensity values would move from August 2030 to August 2031.
Existing obligations to provide information about overseas emissions, in force since May 2025, would remain unaffected.
Parliament faces another regulatory confrontation
The proposed changes require approval from the European Parliament and the Council under the ordinary legislative procedure.
That process could expose differences between governments seeking greater flexibility and lawmakers concerned about weakening the timetable for reducing fossil-fuel emissions.
Industry representatives have sought longer extensions, while environmental organisations argue that delaying methane reductions will not resolve the structural causes of Europe’s energy problems.
Brussels is also confronting the consequences of its decision to phase out Russian gas imports. As EU Today’s examination of the Nord Stream 2 legal challenge explained, the Union’s efforts to eliminate dependence on Moscow have already generated disputes over energy security and European regulatory authority.
The Commission now faces two competing requirements: maintaining a common environmental standard for imported fossil fuels while ensuring that suppliers remain willing and able to serve the European market.
Whether the proposed one-year extension proves sufficient will depend on the recovery of international energy supplies and the ability of producers, importers and national authorities to establish reliable verification arrangements before the revised deadlines.
A small dog that's been on the loose in Yellowstone National Park for a month has been spotted crossing intersections, strolling through employee housing and entering lodges.
A small dog that's been on the loose in Yellowstone National Park for a month has been spotted crossing intersections, strolling through employee housing and entering lodges.
Sales of fast tech like mini fans and disposable e-vapes, as well as wearable health tech such as heart monitors and smartwatches are soaring. They're creating a new e-waste problem but are full of hidden treasure.
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James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)
I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.
Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.
I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor.
Credit: Preston, Samuel, “The Gorham Phelps Purchase,” RBSCP Exhibits, accessed October 8, 2026, https://rbscpexhibits.lib.rochester.edu/items/show/4541.
As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.”
Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe.
The forest, however, was real.
Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through.
So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.
On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s.
While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:
From the 82 mile Stone
120 Rods the groth is Beech
Maple birch ash Basswood
and Hemlock mixt
Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.
Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”
What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?
To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.
Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants.
The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.
It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.
Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”
What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?
The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.
A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped:
“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.”
This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.
At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground.
Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge.
Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.
This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.
I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective.
The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived.
After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid.
I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned.
As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.
Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.
It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.
I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.
The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.
If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil.
In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.
He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.
He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.”
It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields.
Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.
After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.
At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot.
Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.
When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted.
The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me.
Maxwell wrote of this site:
The line of this town is very
good land covered with a thick
growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood
Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.
No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though.
I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home.
Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.
In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.
Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.
I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed.
The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.
I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it.
I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon.
I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project.
Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.
Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories.
Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language.
As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast.
There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.
I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.
When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong.
He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls.
He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.
He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.
The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.
In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring.
No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.
James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post. He teaches at SUNY Brockport.
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