It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Photo 1. (From left) Professor Sang Yup Lee, Dr. Tong Un Chae, Dr. So Young Choi, and Ph.D. candidate Da-Hee Ahn of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Credit: KAIST Metabolic and Biomolecular Engineering National Research Laboratory
Poly(ester amide) amide is a next-generation material that combines the advantages of PET (polyester) and nylon (polyamide), two widely used plastics. However, it could only be produced from fossil fuels, which posed environmental concerns. Using microorganisms, KAIST researchers have successfully developed a new bio-based plastic to replace conventional plastic.
< Photo 1. (From left) Professor Sang Yup Lee, Dr. Tong Un Chae, Dr. So Young Choi, and Ph.D. candidate Da-Hee Ahn of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering >
KAIST (represented by President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced on the 20th of March that a research team led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering has developed microbial strains through systems metabolic engineering to produce various eco-friendly, bio-based poly(ester amide)s. The team collaborated with researchers from the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT, President Young-Kook Lee) to analyze and confirm the properties of the resulting plastic.
Professor Sang Yup Lee’s research team designed new metabolic pathways that do not naturally exist in microorganisms, and developed a platform microbial strain capable of producing nine different types of poly(ester amide)s, including poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-ran-3-aminopropionate) and poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-ran-4-aminobutyrate).
Using glucose derived from abundant biomass sources such as waste wood and weeds, the team successfully produced poly(ester amide)s in an eco-friendly manner. The researchers also confirmed the potential for industrial-scale production by demonstrating high production efficiency (54.57 g/L) using fed-batch fermentation of the engineered strain.
In collaboration with researchers Haemin Jeong and Jihoon Shin from KRICT, the KAIST team analyzed the properties of the bio-based plastic and found that it exhibited characteristics similar to high-density polyethylene (HDPE). This means the new plastic is not only eco-friendly but also strong and durable enough to replace conventional plastics.
< Figure 1. New-to-nature metabolic pathways for the production of poly(ester amide)s (PEAs). >
The engineered strains and strategies developed in this study are expected to be useful not only for producing various poly(ester amide)s but also for constructing metabolic pathways for the biosynthesis of other types of polymers.
Professor Sang Yup Lee stated, “This study is the first to demonstrate the possibility of producing poly(ester amide)s (plastics) through a renewable bio-based chemical process rather than relying on the petroleum-based chemical industry. We plan to further enhance the production yield and efficiency through continued research.”
The study was published online on March 17 in the international journal Nature Chemical Biology.
·Title: Biosynthesis of poly(ester amide)s in engineered Escherichia coli
·DOI: 10.1038/s41589-025-01842-2
·Authors: A total of seven authors including Tong Un Chae (KAIST, first author), So Young Choi (KAIST, second author), Da-Hee Ahn (KAIST, third author), Woo Dae Jang (KAIST, fourth author), Haemin Jeong (KRICT, fifth author), Jihoon Shin (KRICT, sixth author), and Sang Yup Lee (KAIST, corresponding author).
This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) under the Eco-Friendly Chemical Technology Development Project as part of the "Next-Generation Biorefinery Technology Development to Lead the Bio-Chemical Industry" initiative (project led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee at KAIST).
Figure 1. New-to-nature metabolic pathways for the production of poly(ester amide)s (PEAs).
Credit
KAIST Metabolic and Biomolecular Engineering National Research Laboratory
Biosynthesis of poly(ester amide)s in engineered Escherichia coli
Article Publication Date
25-Mar-2025
COI Statement
Tong Un Chae, So Young Choi, Da-Hee Ahn and Sang Yup Lee declare competing financial interests because the strains, PEAs and strategies described in this paper are of commercial interest and are covered by but not limited to a pending patent (Korean Patent Application No. 10-2025-0009527). This patent covers the methods for producing PEAs using engineered strains in this study. The patent was filed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Sang Yup Lee, Tong Un Chae, So Young Choi and Da-Hee Ahn are listed as inventors. The other authors declare no competing interests.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL (SDG)
The Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to Avelino Corma, John Hartwig and Helmut Schwarz for their foundational work on the catalysts that are enabling a more efficient, sustainable chemistry
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences recognizes fundamental advances in the catalysis field that have improved efficiency and reduced energy consumption in multiple industrial processes
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences has gone in this seventeenth edition to Avelino Corma (Institute of Chemical Technology, Universitat Politècnica de València-CSIC, Spain), John F. Hartwig (University of California, Berkeley, United States) and Helmut Schwarz (Technical University of Berlin, Germany) for fundamental advances in the catalysis field, in the words of the committee, that have made it possible to “control and accelerate chemical reactions” and obtain products across multiple industrial processes, thereby “improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption.”
Working independently, the new laureates “have led global thinking in the three main research areas devoted to understanding and applying catalysis, covering the entire spectrum of this fundamental field,” said committee member Hongkun Park, Mark Hyman Jr Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University (United States). Their combined output has paved the way for a more efficient, sustainable chemistry.
Corma spearheaded the development of solid catalysts from porous materials and holds more than 100 patents with applications that are now being used to improve the efficiency of chemical processes and cut back on pollutant emissions in the production of fuels, plastics, cosmetics and food.
The metal-based catalysts developed by Hartwig, active in the liquid phase, have been game changers in the manufacture of drug treatments for numerous conditions ranging from leukemia to HIV or depression. And new applications are now being sought for plastic waste recycling.
Schwarz has succeeded in analyzing gas-phase chemical reactions atom by atom, elucidating their function with an unprecedented level of detail, a fundamental advance that has already served to cut back on waste production in industrial processes while opening the door to new catalysis applications in multiple domains.
“Avelino Corma is a researcher who starts from fundamental, basic science, then works outwards to apply his results to social challenges like sustainability. The fact that the committee considers him deserving of an internationally prestigious award like the Frontiers of Knowledge is a testament to his scientific stature. And in truth he fits perfectly with the name of the scheme, because his foremost concern is to move the frontiers of knowledge,” said José Capilla, the Rector of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), who nominated the Valencian researcher.
“They say that science is full of researchers who do good things, but very few who actually do new things. John Hartwig not only does new things but he does so time and time again. He is one of those people who carve out paths the rest can only follow,” said his nominator Pedro J. Pérez, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Huelva and Head of the Center for Research in Sustainable Chemistry (CIQSO). “I believe the committee made the right decision in distinguishing him alongside professors Corma and Schwarz. Bringing the three together extends this recognition to the whole field of chemistry, and catalysis in particular.”
“This award is extremely well judged given the importance of catalysis research, which accounts for 90 percent of all chemical industry production processes and 30 percent of the world’s GDP. Helmut Schwarz has done real basic science, but has also proved it experimentally. It is to him we owe the insight of incorporating elements of quantum mechanics into basic knowledge of catalytic reactions,” said Jesús Ugalde, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of the Basque Country and a collaborator of Professor Schwarz’s.
Porous materials for the production of greener fuels
Avelino Corma has pioneered the field of heterogeneous catalysis, so called because the catalyst is in a different phase of matter from the agents of the chemical reaction the researcher is seeking to accelerate. In his work, concretely, as he explains it, “the catalyst is a solid and the reactants could be gases or liquids.” In the last 35 years, since co-founding the Institute of Chemical Technology (ITQ) at the Universitat Politècnica de València back in 1990, Corma has led the conception and synthesis of microporous materials that act as solid catalysts, where the reactions unfold inside molecule-sized cavities. “We found that by controlling the size of these cavities and channels, we could select not only what molecules penetrated and therefore reacted, but those whose access and reaction we wanted to avoid,” he explains.
His breakthroughs in this field were described in two papers published in Nature in 1998 and 2006, and a later one published in Science in 2017, where he demonstrated the potential of these microporous materials to efficiently accelerate and control chemical reactions, opening the door to a more sustainable, less polluting chemistry. “In these studies, we showed that by controlling the cavities in these solid catalysts, we could control the reactions that ensued. So we could, for instance, reduce their acidity and thus achieve a lower environmental impact.”
Corma’s influence, as the committee remarked, stretches even further than these basic research findings, which have had a major international impact in the catalysis field. He is also the inventor of over 100 patents with industrial applications that are now being rolled out to improve efficiency and sustainability in the production of fuels, plastics, cosmetics and food. For example, “more than 22 plants around the world now produce gasoline more efficiently, with greater energy efficiency, thanks to a catalyst developed in my research.” In addition, many industrial chemical processes are starting to replace fossil fuels with biomass – obtained, for example, from municipal, agricultural or forestry organic waste – through reactions achieved with solid catalysts derived from advances led by Corma. “We are making great strides towards a more sustainable chemistry thanks to this technology, with catalysts that allow us to reduce the use of fossil hydrocarbons and also prevent the release of pollutants through vehicle combustion and factory chimneys.”
For the laureate, moreover, this is just the start of a technological revolution that in coming years could be a powerful transformative tool in the fight against climate change: “I believe catalysts will enable us to capture CO2 from the atmosphere or biomass on the way to developing fuels and chemical processes with far less environmental impact.”
Catalysts to produce medicines against cancer, HIV and hepatitis
The metal-based catalysts developed by John Hartwig have changed the way drugs are manufactured for conditions ranging from leukemia to HIV or depression. He has excelled in the development of homogeneous catalysis, in which both the catalyst and the molecules undergoing the chemical reaction are in the liquid phase, dissolved in a solution. This enables reactions to occur at relatively low temperatures and at very precise sites within the molecule. “There’s a whole series of medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for diseases like hepatitis C, HIV, depression, psoriasis and leukemia, that rely on the availability of molecules created from reactions developed in my lab,” the new laureate explains.
Hartwig has spent much of his career working on organometallic catalysts, formed by molecules containing both an organic carbon fragment and a transition metal such as platinum. It is precisely the metal-carbon bond that supports chemical reactions by providing a platform on which they can occur.
The awardee has also modified certain enzymes – which, within biological organisms, act as catalysts – by exchanging the naturally occurring metal for another, in order to change their reactivity. Recently, Hartwig was able to insert these “bionic enzymes” into a microorganism and have it make the reagents, the chemicals that react with that enzyme. The chemical reaction, in other words, takes place inside the cells, creating artificial products through a biosynthetic pathway.
Among the reactions Hartwig has focused on most are those occurring at the site of carbon-hydrogen bond cleavage. “These are very strong bonds that are mostly unreactive,” explains the Berkeley chemist, who has developed catalysts that can help break the bond so it accommodates the desired chemical reaction. These catalysts have already been put to work in the production of a key compound for anti-cancer pharmaceuticals and another two against HIV. “It’s really exciting to watch things progress from the very, very fundamental discovery of cleaving a carbon-hydrogen bond to being able to develop large-scale reactions, with thousands of pounds of molecules.”
Another of the awardee’s lauded contributions concerns the formation of the carbon-nitrogen bond; “a reaction – he explains – that doesn’t occur in the absence of a catalyst.” The catalyst he and his team developed to create this bond has led to drugs for depression, HIV and hepatitis C.
Hartwig has since turned his attention to the polymers making up the plastics we use daily, trying to deconstruct their bonds and isolate their components so that they can serve to make new plastic. “Right now plastic is recycled mechanically,” he points out, “but this new method would be chemical recycling, perhaps a future solution to manage the huge amount of plastic waste we generate.”
“The smallest test tube in the world” to observe chemical reactions atom by atom
“My contribution is in many ways unusual,” remarks Helmut Schwarz, “because I have been concerned mainly with basic research but have employed quite unorthodox techniques.” The combination of advanced experiment with advanced computational tools has allowed him to elucidate the functioning of chemical reactions atom by atom, with an unprecedented level of detail. “In most cases there are millions of atoms involved in bringing about a reaction. But what we need to know is which of them are actually doing the business – the aristocratic atoms as we call them.”
Methane, for instance, is known for being very unreactive, but why it is so difficult to activate remains among the big unanswered questions in chemistry. “Millions of tons of methane are released into the atmosphere yearly, and it is a major greenhouse gas. So the question is, can’t we find a better use for it?” The key would lie in finding a way to selectively cleave the carbon-hydrogen bond, a fundamental problem in chemistry which Schwarz set out to probe using the instruments of catalysis.
“Conventional catalysis research is usually done in the condensed phase. But we decided to run our experiment in the gas phase, to avoid uncontrolled side effects that might influence the outcome,” the awardee recalls. They accordingly isolated the atoms one at a time, controlling the reaction environment in such a way that each result could be traced to a single atom rather than the collective effort of thousands – “something people thought for decades was impossible to achieve.”
The means to isolate atoms to observe their individual behavior was provided by the mass spectrometer, a tool invented over 100 years ago but never before used for this purpose. “The mass spectrometer gives us a microscopic view of details which is not available when you look at the average behavior of millions of atoms. It is the world’s smallest test tube.”
Despite his basic science approach, Schwarz’s discoveries have ended up transforming major industrial processes. A case in point is the German factory Degussa, a precious metal refinery that produces a hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen compound used in a large number of industrial applications. The factory developed a way to produce the compound, coupling methane with ammonia by means of a catalyst. But the coal by-product fouled the catalyst and eventually deactivated it. Schwarz was able to uncover key details of how the reaction worked and propose a modification to the catalyst to prevent soot from forming. “So there we have a practical example of how basic research ended up helping a company to substantially improve a process,” says Schwarz.
Having had the experience of his research being dismissed by the more orthodox currents in academia, the awardee’s advice to the new generations is: “Don’t give up too early. Spot where the truly challenging problems are and have the courage to tackle them. Above all, try to excite your co-workers to join the field and see what can be achieved with an enthusiasm for basic research.”
Laureate bio notes
Avelino Corma (Moncófar, Castellón, Spain, 1951) earned a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Valencia in 1973, and just three years later completed his doctorate at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He began his professional career as a scientific researcher for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and is currently a Research Professor at the Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIC/UPV), a mixed center which he co-founded in 1990. For the last fifty years he has researched in heterogeneous catalysis. Author of more than 1,400 papers in international journals, he has also written three books and numerous reviews and served on the editorial boards of leading titles in the catalysis field. Corma holds over 200 invention patents, over 20 of them applied industrially in commercial processes.
John Hartwig,, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences
John Hartwig (Elmhurst, Illinois, United States, 1964) completed a degree in chemistry at Princeton University, then went on to earn a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. That same year he began a postdoctoral fellowship for the American Cancer Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He moved to Yale University in 1992, rising through the ranks to become Professor of Chemistry and finally Irénée DuPont Chair in Chemistry. In 2006, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois-Champaign, where he was Kenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Professor of Chemistry until 2011. He then returned to U.C. Berkeley, where he is currently Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry. The author of over 400 papers, he has also garnered more than 98,000 citations, holds more than 20 patents and in 2010 published the book Organotransition Metal Chemistry – From Bonding to Catalysis.
Helmut Schwarz, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences.
Helmut Schwarz (Nickenich, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, 1943) graduated in chemistry in 1971 after working in industry. He received his PhD degree a year later from the Technical University of Berlin (Germany), which would become his academic home and where he was appointed Professor of Chemistry in 1978. A member of the German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina, serving as its president from 2010 to 2015, the Academia Europaea, and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, among others, Schwarz was also a co-founder of the Berlin-Brandeburg Academy of Sciences, where he was vice-president from 1998 to 2003. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including the Israel Institute of Technology, the University of Innsbruck and ETH Zurich. As well as authoring over 1,000 papers, he has participated in over 1,000 conferences and served on the editorial boards of various journals. From 2001 to 2007 he was vice-president of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Nominators
A total of 94 nominations were received in this edition. The awardee researchers were nominated by José E. Capilla, Rector and Professor of Applied Physics at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) (Spain); Pedro J. Pérez, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Huelva (Spain); and Geraldine Rauch, President and Professor of Medical Biometry at the Technical University of Berlin (Germany).
Basic Sciences committee and evaluation support panel
The committee in this category was chaired by Theodor Hänsch, Emeritus Director of the Division of Laser Spectroscopy at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany) and the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Physics, with Aitziber López Cortajarena, Ikerbasque Research Professor, Scientific Director and Biomolecular Nanotechnology Group Leader at CIC biomaGUNE, Center for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials (Spain), acting as secretary.
Remaining members were Emmanuel Candès, Barnum-Simons Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University (United States); María José García Borge, Research Professor at the Institute for the Structure of Matter (IEM), CSIC (Spain): Nigel Hitchin, Emeritus Savilian Professor of Geometry in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom); Hongkun Park, Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University (United States); Martin Quack, Professor and Head of the Molecular Kinetics and Spectroscopy Group at ETH Zurich (Switzerland); and Sandip Tiwari, Charles N. Mellowes Professor in Engineering, Emeritus at Cornell University (United States) and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (India).
The evaluation support panel charged with nominee pre-evaluation was coordinated by Dr. Elena Cartea, Deputy Vice-President of Scientific-Technical Areas at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC,) and organized into three groups. The Physics Group was coordinated by María José Calderón Prieto, Deputy Coordinator of the Materia Global Area and Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM, CSIC) and formed by Alberto Casas González, Research Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT, CSIC-UAM); Pere Colet Rafecas, Research Professor at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC, CSIC-UIB); Lourdes Fábrega Sánchez, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB, CSIC); and Alejandro Luque Estepa, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA, CSIC). The Chemistry Group was coordinated by José M. Mato, General Director of CIC bioGUNE and CIC biomaGUNE, and formed by Miguel Ángel Bañares González, Research Professor at the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry (ICP, CSIC); Antonio Chica Lara, Coordinator of the Materia Global Area and Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Chemical Technology (ITQ, CSIC-UPV); Jesús Jiménez-Barbero, Scientific Director of CIC bioGUNE and Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Chemical Glycobiology Lab; Gonzalo Jiménez-Osés, Principal Investigator in the Computational Chemistry Lab at CIC bioGUNE; Luis Liz-Marzán, Principal Investigator in the Bionanoplasmonics Lab at CIC biomaGUNE; Aitziber López Cortajarena, Ikerbasque Research Professor, Scientific Director and Principal Investigator in the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Lab at CIC biomaGUNE; and María Luz Sanz Murias, Scientific Researcher at the Institute of General Organic Chemistry (IQOG, CSIC). The Mathematics Group was coordinated by José María Martell Berrocal, CSIC Vice-President for Scientific and Technical Research, and formed by María Jesús Carro Rosell, Professor of Mathematical Analysis at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM); Alberto Enciso Carrasco, Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT, CSIC); Francisco Martín Serrano, Professor of Differential Geometry at the University of Granada; and Rosa María Miró Roig, Professor in the Department of Algebra and Geometry at the University of Barcelona.
About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards
The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, funded with 400,000 euros in each of their eight categories, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in basic sciences, biomedicine, environmental sciences and climate change, information and communication technologies, social sciences, economics, humanities and music. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good, the best instrument to confront the great challenges of our time and expand individual worldviews. Their eight categories are congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century.
The BBVA Foundation is partnered in these awards by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country’s premier public research organization. CSIC appoints evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding knowledge area, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of candidates and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating each committee’s chair across the eight prize categories and participates in the selection of remaining members, helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of innovation and scientific excellence. The presidency of CSIC also has a prominent role in the awards ceremony held each year in Bilbao, the permanent home of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
The Fix Our Forests Act and the Politics of Wildfire Logging interests and the U.S. Forest Service have a history of using the wildfire threat to create “emergency” authority to bypass environmental reviews and curtail judicial oversight.
Trees grow in a redwood forest. (Photo: Getty Images)
When on January 23 of this year, California Senator Jarred Huffman stood on the House floor to voice his opposition to the Fix Our Forests Act, or FOFA,, he bitterly noted how the bill had been rushed to a vote without normal consultation.
The reason for the rush was obvious. Fires were raging in the suburbs of Los Angeles and FOFA’s proponents wanted to capitalize on the tragedy to pitch their bill, which in the name of wildfire prevention exempts vast acreage of backcountry logging from ordinary scientific and judicial oversight. The irony is that the LA fires had no connection with forests whatsoever. They began as grass and brush fires near populated areas, which, fanned by ferocious Santa Ana winds, quickly spread building to building, with disastrous results.
The irony widens when you consider that in 2024, Huffman, along with California Republican Jay Obernolte, introduced a bill that actually would help communities deal with fire. Called the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act, it proposed $1 billion per year to help communities harden homes and critical infrastructure while also creating defensive space around their perimeters. The bill was introduced this year yet again, six days after FOFA was rushed to a vote, but it hasn’t even been given a hearing by the House Natural Resources Committee. That committee is chaired by Oklahoma Republican Bruce Westerman, who, it turns out, is the chief sponsor of the Fix Our Forests Act.
Once again, it’s the same old formula: slash citizen oversight in the name of wildfire reduction.
Do you see the political convolutions at work here? A very real fire danger facing communities is used to promote a bill focused primarily on back country “fuels reduction,” far from such communities, while the Huffman-Obernolte bill, that focuses on the communities themselves, gets nowhere. The process not only puts millions of acres of mature and old-growth forests at risk of massive “mechanical treatments,” it leaves the immediate fire dangers faced by communities largely unaddressed.
This political formula is nothing new. Twenty two years ago, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, which also sought environmental restrictions for expanded logging under the pretext of preventing wildfires like those in California. The concern for conservationists was the same then as it is now—logging interests and the U.S. Forest Service using the wildfire threat to create “emergency” authority to bypass environmental reviews and curtail judicial oversight, providing easier access to mature and old-growth forests, while doing little in the way of home hardening and community protection.
Proponents of the Fix our Forests Act would counter that there are provisions within the bill that help coordinate grant applications for communities. That’s well and good, but falls far short of what the Huffman-Obernolte bill provides, which not only includes major funding to harden homes and critical infrastructure, but helps with early detection and evacuation planning and initiates Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience plans for insurance certification.
Further, there is a plethora of research that contradicts the notion that fuels reduction and forest thinning protects communities from wildfire. In fact, intensive forest management is shown to often increase fire severity. Meanwhile, the industry position that forest protection increases fire risk doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, years of mechanical treatments have done little to solve the problem, while doing tremendous ecological damage.
Now we have President Donald Trump’s all-caps Executive Order: “IMMEDIATE EXPANSION OF AMERICAN TIMBER PRODUCTION.” Once again, it’s the same old formula: slash citizen oversight in the name of wildfire reduction. The order calls for action to “reduce unnecessarily lengthy processes and associated costs related to administrative approvals for timber production, forest management, and wildfire risk reduction treatments,” while putting community safety up as the justification. From the first paragraph: “Furthermore, as recent disasters demonstrate, forest management and wildfire risk reduction projects can save American lives and communities.” Only they don’t. The only things shown to save lives and communities are the types of actions put forth by the Community Protections and Wildfire Resilience act.
The Democratic Party has a history of protecting public lands and a constituency that expects such protection. A similar thing can be said of certain moderate Republicans, where a courageous spirit prevails when it comes to environmental protection. If there ever was a time to remember that tradition and that spirit, it would be now.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Rob Lewis is an environmental writer, poet, and activist. He has been published in numerous anthologies, newspapers, and magazines, and is the author of the poem and essay collection, The Silence of Vanishing Things. He currently writes the Substack newsletter, The Climate According to Life. Full Bio >
Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, businessman Jeff Bezos, Alphabet's CEO Sundar Pichai, and businessman Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend the United States Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control. Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege. Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity. Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right. Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
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Vinnie Rotondaro Vinnie Rotondaro’s work has appeared in Vox, Vice, and Narratively, where he won the 2014 New York Press Club award for “best internet feature.” Currently, he is a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he is studying the intersections of identity, power structures, and historical consciousness, with a focus on the Italian American experience. Full Bio >
Poster from a protest against Elon Musk by MoveOn, February 4, 2025. Geoff Livingston, Flickr, Creative Commons.
I worked for 2 years on Capitol Hill and 25 years for the US Environmental Protection Agency. During those 27 years I met many bureaucrats and a few Congressmen and Senators. I even met the mother of President Jimmy Carter and the Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland.
This experience opened my eyes to the advantages of government served by well-educated, competent, honest, and dedicated civil servants. The industry perpetually seeks decisions from government agencies on their products. Some of those products seeking and requiring approval by the US EPA, for example, pesticides, can be lethal to wildlife and humans alike. So, government experts evaluating such chemicals must possess advanced knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology. Unfortunately, these experts work in an environment dominated largely by politics, not science. This means that the lobbyists, not scientists, have the ear of policy makers. I came across and lived through this chaos: scientists making their arguments for human and environmental health protection in technical memos; the opposition from lobbyists representing companies, manufacturers, and powerful legal firms saying their products would save the farmers and increase prosperity. The cacophony and lies of deregulation disturbed me.
I attended hundreds of meetings of EPA scientists, and industry lobbyists and senior EPA policy makers. At times, the public interest of safety prevailed, as in the early years of the EPA, 1970s. But many times, the political appointees made decisions that favored the industry. These decisions, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, explain why conventional, not certified organic, food is probably laced by neurotoxins and carcinogens while ecosystems and wildlife have been threatened with diseases, destruction, and extinction. I protested such policies and, immediately, senior people branded me with a slander of not being a “team player” and, worse, tried firing me. In 1990, they took steps for firing me, but the administrator, William Reilly, rejected their efforts.
My life at EPA became precarious. I had to be very careful. Senior managers even planted a spy in my office who provoked me and, no doubt, reported me to his bosses. A colleague warned me about the spy. The consequences of this treatment were severe. I was promoted only once. So, speaking out was very hazardous and expensive. Despite the antagonism between me and a few senior officials over policy, I persevered. I simply could not accept fashionable deregulation, which compromised science and public and environmental health in order to profit agribusiness. This moral dilemma angered and astonished me. For some time, I refused to accept the US was falling from the rule of law and civilization. No civilized society would willfully feed its people tainted food and risk life on Earth.
Some of my colleagues shared my frustrations. They suspected I was going to write about corruption at EPA. At appropriate times spanning more than 2 decades, they gave me their memos and other reports they authored. The information and knowledge in those documents and my personal experience helped me write my 2014 book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA.
Public good
I never gave in to the corrupt temptations for career advancement. Call it stubbornness or moral commitments to science-based decisions for the protection of human and environmental health. I came out of Greek culture centered around the propositions of “the beautiful and the good” and “know yourself” that necessitate the virtues of the supremacy of truth and the public good.
I still have the best memories of the civil servants I worked with. They were my friends. They were certainly more diplomatic than I was, but they did serve the public good with their scientific reports. Now, in 2025, the leadership of America is outdoing the corrupt environmental policies of the Ronald Reagan administration of the 1980s. President Donald Trump and his billionaire co-ruler, Elon Musk, are unravelling the federal government. Their purpose is not efficiency. It is political and ecological disruption. Musk is the “wrecking ball” of “crucial institutions.” He picked up on the fashionable idea of billionaires working long and hard for their ill-gotten wealth.
David Brooks of the New York Times hit the nail on the head, saying: “The “DOGE boys” [of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency], “are mostly incompetent, so the fiscal effect will probably be tiny, but they are unleashing a reign of terror and intimidation that will affect the psychology of all federal workers.”
True. DOGE has been demoralizing and firing thousands of civil servants. However, twenty-one government workers with expertise in data and digital services resigned to protest the vandalism of the billionaire Musk. They said they came to government from holding senior technology positions in private companies. Their goal and mission was to serve all Americans no matter their political affiliation. But seeing the ruthlessness of Musk and his young assistants, they decided that resignation was better than disavowing their oath to serve America. They explained why they left the government in their letter of resignation dated February 25, 2025:
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations. However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments… [The] removal of highly skilled civil servants… endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe… [DOGE’s] actions are not compatible with the mission we joined the United States Digital Service to carry out: to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design. We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”
I understand these courageous technologists. I, too, lived through a reign of terror and intimidation, so I fully sympathize with them. And while in my case, “whistleblowers” were treated harshly, in the Trump / Musk administration most government workers are treated like whistleblowers for reasons unrelated to informing the public about corruption in the government and industry.
Erik Baker, historian of science at Harvard, gives us useful insights for trying to explain the bizarre behavior of Musk. He says, “Mr. Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion. Now he is seeking to extend this logic into our government, transforming it, like one of his companies, into another personal fief.”
Artificial Intelligence fuels the fiefdom of the tech billionaires
With large companies the world over firing workers and replacing them with machines, Musk is bringing this deskilling and debilitating force for the running of the federal government. Musk is an expert in dumping workers for machines. He culled the workers of the companies he purchased. Erik Baker says that after Musk took over Twitter, “he fired half its employees and informed those who remained that he would be imposing an “extremely hard-core” management style; many of them took his offer to resign in exchange for three months of severance. Now Mr. Musk is applying the same playbook to the federal government, seeking to replace career officials with DOGE shock troops and machine learning algorithms.”
Climate chaos
Firing workers increases the profits of billionaires like Musk. It’s the same thing with deregulation. The downsides, ecocide and diseases like cancer, take time to manifest themselves. Climate chaos, however, is different. Hurricanes, fires, and flooding hit hard. Yet for a long time, we failed to connect nature’s anthropogenic fury to human actions. Petroleum companies, which knew since the 1970s of the consequences of ceaseless burning of their product, polluted the atmosphere and muddled waters by funding / bribing academics to keep raising doubts about the causes of climate change.
Indeed, the 1990 effort at the US EPA to dismiss me from the civil service was directly associated to an article I wrote for the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 10, 1989), in which I pointed my finger at the petroleum companies for causing climate chaos.
What I did not know in 1989 was that the US was warming 68 percent faster than any other country on Earth. The bad news came out in November 14, 2023 by the US Fifth National Climate Assessment.
I wonder how is it possible after a decade of climate fires, heat waves on land and sea, ice melting, permafrost thawing, floods, droughts, and destruction of property costing hundreds of billions, how politicians like Trump and Elon Musk, as well as most Republican politicians, dare ignore such calamities and existential dangers? The Trump administration even withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. It’s mind-boggling. Are they extraterrestrials? Don’t they read? Do they hate science? And, finally, don’t they care about their children and grandchildren? Is America dropping to another dark age?
Freezing the government
As I already said, I remember my days at the US Environmental Protection Agency, starting with the immoral effort to freeze the federal government by the Ronald Reagan administration. Vice President George Walker Bush used to go to government agencies demanding that they rethink any project they funded that cost more than $ 100,000. Deregulation was the most fashionable policy of the Republicans. Reagan even dismantled the solar panels President Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. His EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, fired the agency’s lawyers responsible for enforcing the laws.
The Republican and Democratic politicians were blind to the industry corruption my EPA colleague, Adrian Gross, had revealed. Gross, a capable and dedicated pathologist, brought to light decades-long criminal chemical industry practices of making data out of thin air. That is, Gross caught a giant laboratory, International Bio-test Laboratory (IBT) near Chicago, giving clean reports to hazardous pesticides and other chemicals it tested for companies, states, and even governments. In other words, farmers used those dangerous carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals “tested” by IBT and other corrupt laboratories. Those dangerous chemicals had been approved by the EPA because of the fake reports of IBT and the climate of corruption. But the findings of Gross made some difference, and, in 1983, the US EPA and the Justice Department put IBT out of business. Yet, the Republicans and not a few Democrats continue to push their deregulation year after year. By the early twenty-first century, the US EPA was a skeleton of its early 1970s self. Deregulation became policy. Companies still “test” their pesticides and other chemicals. EPA was forced to shut down its own laboratories and do away with its scientists who inspected laboratories. One of those laboratories that closed tested the efficacy of antibiotics. The EPA even deleted public access to hundreds of studies it had funded. Corruption became the law of the land. For example, agribusiness lobbyists are convincing Iowa legislators to give immunity from prosecution to pesticide merchants. The proposed legislation would not allow Iowans suing pesticide companies for failing to warn their products might cause cancer.
What Trump and Musk are doing are accelerating the toxic policies of the Reagan administration. With diminished, dispirited, and frightened federal workers, the industries will do exactly what the cigarette companies did for more than a century. Their advertisements will continue to repeat the lie that American food is the safest in the planet. Meanwhile, our “safe” farmers are sterilizing the land, almost wiping out biodiversity, and even threatening honeybees with extinction. Their animal farms are dormant factories of disease, potential pandemics, and contaminated meat.
Apparently, these dire threats are beyond Trump. His speech to Congress, March 3, 2025, was more of the same rhetoric of deceit and hubris. Frank Bruni of the New York Times, said that “Everything in Trump’s world is extreme, absolute, unnuanced, superlative. Worst ever. Best ever. “Like nothing that has ever been seen before.” Over and over. It’s juvenile. It’s narcissistic.” And yet, Trump and his billionaire advisor, Musk, keep talking about MAGA. But do they understand the word greatness?
Alexander the Great earned that honor because of his genius in strategic thinking and unparalleled courage and virtues. He united the ecumene. He built 70 poleis (cities) all over Asia. Those cities had Greek institutions of civilization: schools, libraries, the rule of law, theaters, athletic games and festivals.
Sliding back to another dark age?
Trump and Musk, however, are not building civilization. They are wrecking it. They know that deregulation increases risk, corruption, disease, and violence. It enables factory owners to profit at the expense of public and environmental health. Seeing Musk wielding a chain saw like a weapon unmasked him and his collaborator and enabler, Trump. These co-emperors intend to discard the already weak democratic institutions of America, thus converting the country officially to a plutocracy. This means setting aside the rule of law and returning to the lawless rule of weapons and wealth.
Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., studied history and biology at the University of Illinois; earned his Ph.D. in Greek and European history at the University of Wisconsin; did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US EPA; taught at several universities and authored several books, including The Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and its Demise. He is the author of Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards, forthcoming by World Scientific, Spring 2025.
