Where is 'La Navidad'?: Mystery surrounds the site of first Spanish settlement in Americas

Copyright María Muñoz Morillo.

By Cristian Caraballo

Published on 12/10/2026 

EURONEWS

On Christmas Eve 1492, the Santa María ran aground off Haiti. Christopher Columbus used its timbers to build Fort Navidad, where 39 men died. More than five centuries later, archaeologists have yet to pinpoint the site.

Spain's history of maritime navigation in the 15th century is full of stories and an epic quality rivalled only, perhaps, by the Portuguese empire. One of those stories surrounds the first Spanish settlement established in the Americas.

On his first voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus sailed with three ships: the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa María; but only two of them returned to Spain. It is widely known that on 12 October 1942 land was sighted from the Pinta. It was the discovery of the New World.

At 23:00 on a cold 24 December 1492, Columbus went to sleep. As he recorded in his logbook, he had not closed his eyes for two days. The sea was, in his own words, "like a bowl", and the Santa María was making slow headway along an unknown stretch of coast in the north of Hispaniola. Around midnight, the ship ran aground on a reef.

Columbus, far from dwelling on the loss, decided to dismantle her and, using her planks and the nails that still did their job, he built the fort of Navidad, which could house almost 40 men and lasted less than a year.

When Columbus returned, no one was left alive and now, more than five centuries later, no one has been able to prove with precision and certainty exactly where stood this edifice in Spanish seafaring history.

The night of the disaster

The shipwreck was the result of a chain of errors. Columbus went to bed and left the ship sailing on in a light wind. The helmsman on duty did the same: seeing the calm coast, he handed over the steering of the vessel to a cabin boy, something Columbus had expressly forbidden throughout the voyage. This led to the Santa María's hull splitting open after running aground almost silently on a reef, near what is now the bay of Cap-Haïtien.

A portrait of Christopher Columbus AP Photo

Around midnight, currents pushed the ship onto a shoal. She touched so gently that almost no one realised what was coming. The boy felt the rudder scrape the bottom, heard the sound of the sea, began to shout and Columbus jumped out of bed.

But it was already too late, so late that the tide had already fallen. He ordered the main mast to be cut down to lighten the ship and told Juan de la Cosa, master and owner of the vessel, to take an anchor out in the skiff. De la Cosa disobeyed, another link in the chain of errors: he took the boat to the Niña, which was sailing nearby. The Santa María listed and her planks sprang apart. Columbus transferred the crew to the Niña and waited for dawn.

The day of construction

With the first light, Columbus sent messengers to Guacanagarí, one of the five Taíno chiefs on Hispaniola.According to what they told him later, the cacique wept when he heard the news. He sent all his people out in large canoes and helped to unload the ship with his brothers and relatives. He ordered the goods to be stored beside the houses, and even emptied some so they would fit. Columbus wrote to the Catholic Monarchs that he did not believe there were "better people or better land" anywhere.

Everything that could be salvaged was saved, from supplies to deck planks and hull timbers. Columbus decided to leave a garrison there. He believed that gold was abundant on the island, and the loss of the ship made it necessary to leave men behind so that the rest of the expedition could return to Spain with only the Niña.

Around 26 December he began to build a fort from the timber and nails of the ship and called it La Navidad, after the night of the wreck. Historian Carlos Martínez Shaw recalls that the log itself records that the ship was beyond repair and was broken up, and that the fort was sufficiently large to house 39 people.

The chronicles relate that Columbus had artillery fired at what remained of the hull so that the Taínos could see his power. On 30 December, Guacanagarí seated him on a platform of palm and placed his own crown on his head.

The "39 of La Navidad" were placed under the orders of Diego de Arana, constable of the expedition. Among them were the king's pantry steward Pero Gutiérrez, Rodrigo de Escobedo, a surgeon, three craftsmen, a gunner and a tailor. Their mission was to trade with the Taínos and find out where the mine lay. Columbus set sail on the Niña in early 1493 on his return to Castile.

What happened to the first Spanish settlement in the Americas

The admiral returned on 27 November 1493, on his second voyage, with 17 ships and around 1,500 men. He found the fort burnt to the ground and the Spaniards dead, most of them disfigured. Guacanagarí blamed the attack on another chief, the lord of the mines. Historians still wonder whether the leader who had welcomed them might have had a hand in it. Columbus did not rebuild the fort but founded another settlement, La Isabela, elsewhere on the island.

The most serious find came from William Hodges, an American missionary doctor and amateur archaeologist. His patients showed him highly elaborate Taíno pottery and in 1977 he located the site of En Bas Saline, in northern Haiti. It was a major Taíno centre, very close to where the Santa María went down.

The Florida Museum of Natural History excavated there together with Haiti's Bureau National d'Ethnologie between 1983 and 1988, and returned in 2003. In total, 276 square metres were dug. The 2003 campaign confirmed that the central mound was a large structure burned at the end of the 15th century. Researchers identified En Bas Saline as Guacanagarí's village and as the probable site of La Navidad.

Among the animal remains, they found the first trace of the black rat from the Old World on the island. The definitive proof is still missing. Today there is no conclusive evidence fixing the exact location of the fort, and none of its timber has been identified in a way that is beyond dispute.

Related

• How Christopher Columbus used an eclipse to save his life in Jamaica

The wreck of the Santa María

The other piece of the puzzle is the ship. In 2014, underwater explorer Barry Clifford announced that he had found the Santa María in waters off northern Haiti. The Haitian culture minister, Monique Rocourt, said at the time that the evidence she had seen suggested it was not the ship.

The director of Haiti's National Bureau of Ethnology, Erol Josué, pointed out that the ship could not be lying on the seabed, because its planks had been used to build the fort.

Historian María Luisa Cazorla has put forward another hypothesis. The coastline has advanced because of sediment carried by rivers, and the remains of the ship would now lie on land, under some six metres of deposits. Her thesis argues that the wreck could be located within a radius of a few hundred metres by geophysical prospecting. In August 2026, 'History.com' was still referring to the Haitian wreck as a purported discovery.

For the moment, neither the ship nor the fort built from her timbers have turned up conclusively. Unwittingly, Columbus had laid the foundations of an empire that would last for centuries and where the sun never set.

Republicans say they hate communists. So why do they like Donald Trump?

Eduardo Porter
Sun, October 4, 2026 
OPINION

THE GUARDIAN


'The president's statist leanings mark a dramatic break with the market-focused presidencies of his recent predecessors, Democrat and Republican.'Photograph: Mark Makela/Getty Images

Americans will never accept the Democratic party's slide to the left, or so desperate Republicans are hoping.

With the midterm elections fast upon us, Zohran Mamdani's promise of a few city-run bodegas in New York City will scare the bejeezus out of middle America. Disgust over the democratic socialists' unicorn-and-puppy promises of a world without capitalism will keep the Republicans in power.

Leading the charge against the new reds-under-the-bed is Donald Trump. "Together, we will defeat communism," Trump promised in his recent TV ads.

Trump's supporters might be surprised to discover that the United States is, indeed, sliding in the direction of a command and control economy. But the state takeover of the means of production is not being driven by the left. The grab for the US's productive resources is the project of none other than Trump – who, it's a fair guess, has never read Lenin.

The latest evidence comes in data crunched by the V-Dem project in Sweden, which measures the erosion of democracy around the world. It built a scale to gauge "state ownership of the economy". As noted by Cullen Hendrix from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, from 2002 to 2024, the US ranked among the four countries with the least state control. In 2025, the first year of Trump's second term, it dropped from second place to 16th.

By November of last year, the Trump administration had spent more than $10bn taking stakes in companies he deemed essential for national security, from Intel to a range of ventures mining for critical minerals. It also acquired an option to take a stake in Westinghouse, which makes nuclear reactors. And it blackmailed Nippon Steel into granting Trump's Washington a "golden share" in exchange for the go-ahead to purchase US Steel.

To be fair, Trump's acquisitiveness notwithstanding, the US is not even close to flirting with the flavor of socialism favored by the Soviet Union and its satellites in the second half of the 20th century. By the V-Dem accounting, Washington's stake in the economy is still smaller than in 163 countries.

Government-run companies are a standard feature in many market economies. The Norwegian government has a majority stake in its massive oil company, which puts the country in 18th place. Even "communist" countries are pretty capitalist: private companies contribute 60% of China's GDP.

And in a geopolitical landscape shaped by competition with China, there is a reasonable case to be made for Washington to take equity stakes in industries that are critical for American leadership and security, and which might not develop autonomously in competition with rivals heavily subsidized by Beijing.

Yet Trump's wanton lunge for private assets lacks the discipline required for this kind of strategic positioning.

The president's statist leanings mark a dramatic break with the market-focused presidencies of his recent predecessors, Democrat and Republican. The question is, what motivates him? His appetites are embedded in a body of thought that is skeptical, if not outright hostile, towards essential building blocks of the global market economy. He has pushed back against globalization since his first term in office, seemingly drawn to the Marxist-inspired dependency theory, which washed across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s proposing protectionism and state industrial policy as a path to economic development.

His lust to control the economy is there for all to see. Though the supreme court already slapped down his attempt to take over trade policy from Congress, he is still threatening to "STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT". His promise to give $5,000 to every American if Republicans maintain control of Congress in November's elections underscores how he views the state's coffers as his private piggy bank. Even his commie-bashing ads were paid for by taxpayer dollars.

Still, he clearly has no interest in the dictatorship of the proletariat, caring little if at all for the fate of the downtrodden. His preferred flavor of redistribution takes from those on the bottom to give to those on the top.

If anything, Trump reminds us that socialism is not the only ideological justification for state projects to take control over resources and wealth.

Watching the US president bow to Xi Jinping last week, it's tempting to think that Trump wants to emulate China's leader. Xi gets to rule unimpeded over more than one billion Chinese. He gets to shape China's society and economy at will – purging this rival, raising that sycophant to power.

But Xi's China is too disciplined for Trump. The Chinese leader still relies on hordes of technocrats to execute a coherent strategy aimed to achieve technological superiority. The US president doesn't have the attention span for this kind of thing.

Rather, Trump's model might be Vladimir Putin, who rules Russia like a fiefdom. Or maybe one of those dictators the US used to support in Latin America during the cold war: Haiti's Papa Doc Duvalier or Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, who saw government as a tool to enrich their families and cement dynasties in power. If nothing else, Trump's dealings with crypto suggest he views his administration as a road to family riches.

Karl Marx may not be Trump's guiding light. But his writings can help understand Trump's place in history. Marx proposes that his tome The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, about the 1851 coup that brought Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte to power in France, was meant to "demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part".

Americans may be grateful that their most recent class struggles didn't produce a homegrown Lenin. But they did deliver Donald Trump.

Perhaps this does not condemn the US to an autocratic future. Hendrix points out that while Trump "clearly wants to be king", the US's political economy may not let him. Putin managed to establish autocratic rule over a fairly primitive, oil-based economy. This kind of control "is much harder to achieve in a modern complex economy" such as that of the United States, Hendrix noted. You can't simply seize the oil to run the place.

Though Trump may fail, Americans' acquiescence as he grabs for power raises a question for those who freak out over Mamdani's city-run bodegas: why is Trump's lurch to take over the American economy any better than what they hear from the Democratic Socialists of America?

Eduardo Porter is a journalist focused on economics and politics. He writes the newsletter Being There on Substack

 

Extreme El Niño could cost Latin America 2% of GDP, ECLAC warns

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By bne IntelliNews September 23, 2026

An extreme El Niño event could wipe at least 2% off Latin America and the Caribbean's gross domestic product over three years and push as many as 4.8mn more people into poverty by the end of the decade, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said in a new report.

The Santiago-based commission said half of the cumulative output loss would come in the first year after the event. It expects energy, fishing, agriculture and some infrastructure to suffer most. The warning came in a special report led by ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs.

"Responses adopted once the emergency has been declared are considerably more expensive than preventive measures based on adequate anticipation. It is imperative that we shift from a response after losses to anticipatory management of climate risk," Salazar-Xirinachs said.

The report cited projections from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA puts the chance of El Niño reaching very high intensity during the northern hemisphere's autumn and winter of 2026-2027 at more than 90%. It gives a 69% probability of a historic "Super El Niño", with sea surface temperature anomalies of more than 2.5C or 3.0C in the Niño 3.4 region.

ECLAC said human-driven climate change was amplifying natural variability. It noted that global average temperatures were 1.55C above pre-industrial levels in 2024.

The commission said the economic effects would vary widely across countries and would last. It expects lower real output, inflationary pressure and higher poverty, as falling household income feeds through the region's economies.

Power grids exposed

The report said the region's power sector was especially vulnerable. Hydropower accounts for more than 70% of electricity generation in several countries, and more than half of installed capacity is over 30 years old.

ECLAC estimated a 60% chance of below-normal rainfall in the October-December quarter. It said 31.1% of the region's territory was on high alert. Hotter weather would drive up demand for air conditioning in cities such as Lima, São Paulo and Mexico City while water supplies were shrinking. According to the report, that raises the risk of blackouts and higher operating costs.

Fisheries and farms at risk

A weaker upwelling of cold Pacific waters would reduce phytoplankton and disrupt the marine food chain, ECLAC said. That could send stocks of anchovy, sardine and hake deeper or push them to migrate. During earlier Super El Niño episodes, the regional fish catch fell 52.7% in 1972-1973 and 26.9% in 1997-1998. Those episodes also brought harmful algal blooms and widespread coral bleaching.

ECLAC cited analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) showing a more than 70% probability of drought hitting agriculture in the coming months in several areas. These are Central America's Dry Corridor, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The report said drought could threaten staple crops, animal feed supplies and rural incomes.

Call for anticipatory action

To stop climate shocks from turning into prolonged social and economic crises, ECLAC urged governments to adopt a 10-point policy package. It called for climate risk to become a permanent part of national policymaking and regulation. It also called for stronger protection of strategic infrastructure, wider early warning systems, and financial buffers such as reserve funds, catastrophe bonds and insurance.

The commission also recommended targeted cash transfers to vulnerable households and support for livelihoods in the Dry Corridor and fishing communities. It called for restoring reefs and mangroves and for flexible fishing quotas and closures. On energy and water, it urged countries to add more solar and wind power so grids depend less on rainfall, share energy reserves and manage cross-border river basins jointly. It also recommended curbing urban power demand during heatwaves.

"Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation," by Hugh Locke

September 20, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Key Takeaways:

Smallholders already feed a third. Hugh Locke’s Whole Earth Farming (Climate Week NYC) says about 475 million Global South farms under two hectares produce ~30% of world food and house ~2 billion people, yet get the least finance, markets, and extension.

His 2050 bet. Supporting about 240 million of those families on ~12% of arable land with regenerative farming and agroforestry, he argues, could cover extra food demand from ~1.5 billion more people without further degrading nature. Haiti’s SFA (~10,000 members, co-founded with Timote Georges): ~40% higher yields, 50–100% higher household income, ~1 million trees a year via “tree currency.”

Climate and measurement, with caveats. Locke cites peer-reviewed work putting mature soil-carbon removal at ~0.48–0.72 Gt CO2/year on ~480 million hectares, plus ~0.1 Gt from less fertilizer (~0.6–0.85 Gt CO2e/year, aviation-scale)—only while soils still take up carbon (often 1–3 decades). He backs Regen10 outcomes over a practice checklist and treats Bahá’í farm principles as optional “open-source” ethics, not a creed. Foreword: Rockefeller’s Roy Steiner.

Just Half World’s 475 Million Smallholder Farmers Could Meet All Of Humanity’s Additional Food Needs In 2050 While Restoring Soils And Biodiversity

Hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers could play an outsized role in feeding humanity’s growing population while restoring nature, but a new book underlines that they are the least supported producers in global agriculture.

Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation says there are roughly 475 million smallholder farms in the Global South, typically operating on less than two hectares (five acres). Together, these farmers already produce about 30% of the world’s food, despite severely limited access to finance, markets, technical and practical education support.

In his book, development expert Hugh Locke says helping just half of the smallholders farmers worldwide – about 240 million farming families – to adopt regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could yield all the additional food required by population growth through 2050 while improving rather than degrading nature.


And those farms would occupy only about 12% of the world’s arable land.

“The world’s smallholder farmers are too often treated as beneficiaries of development assistance when they should be recognized as architects of the next agricultural transformation,” says Locke, co-founder of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti.

The world population is expected to increase by roughly 1.5 billion by 2050, he notes, with that growth concentrated in developing countries. Locke’s central proposition is that meeting that additional food does not have to come at the cost of further soil degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Instead, he argues, the same investment needed to increase smallholder productivity could help turn agriculture into a regenerative force.
Haiti: a working laboratory

Many of the insights in Whole Earth Farming are based on Locke’s experience with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA), which he co-founded with Haitian agronomist Timote Georges in 2010.


The organization now works with roughly 10,000 member farmers in Haiti.

When participating smallholders receive basic agricultural support based on sustainable practices, their yields increase by an average of about 40%, he notes, while household incomes rise between 50 – 100%, depending on local conditions.

SFA members also plant an average of approximately 1 million trees a year.

With SFA’s leadership and help, Haiti’s farmers began transitioning production to a regenerative approach that combines agroforestry with what the SFA calls “tree currency”: farmers plant and care for trees in exchange for agricultural services, training, seeds and other inputs. The model connects increased farm productivity directly with environmental restoration.

The Haiti experience helped shape one of the book’s central conclusions: hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers are producing below their potential because agricultural policies, research, financing and extension systems have disproportionately supported large-scale agriculture for decades.

“This is not about nostalgia or returning agriculture to the past,” Locke says. “It is about recognizing where one of the greatest opportunities for the future now exists.”
Farming that restores instead of extracting from nature

Rather than simply reduce the damage farming causes, regenerative agriculture is a holistic approach to farming that aims to improve the natural systems on which agriculture depends.


It draws on three streams of knowledge: Indigenous and ancestral farming traditions; decades of experience with organic farming, agroecology, permaculture and other sustainable approaches; and contemporary science, including advances in soil biology, ecosystem science and impact measurement.

Depending on local conditions, regenerative farmers can employ techniques including crop rotation, cover crops, intercropping and diverse cropping systems, composting and other methods of building soil organic matter, reduced tillage, agroforestry and integration of livestock.

The objective is not adherence to a universal checklist. It is measurable improvement in outcomes such as soil health, biodiversity, water quality and availability, carbon storage, food production, farmer livelihoods and community resilience.

Locke describes this as regenerative agriculture’s “dual revolution”: a farming methodology and a framework for determining whether farming is actually producing regenerative results.

This distinction is important because practices appropriate to a smallholder in Haiti, India or Kenya may be very different from those suitable for a farm in Canada or the United States.


“The question is not simply, ‘Are you using regenerative practices?'” says Locke. “The more important question is, ‘Is the land, the ecosystem and the farming community measurably better as a result?'”

The approach represents a shift, he says, from shifting agricultural practices to “do less harm” to practices designed to produce net positive outcomes.
Climate dividend

The book also examines how such a transformation could affct climate change.

Healthy soils and growing plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store carbon in soil and biomass. Regenerative systems can also reduce emissions associated with the manufacture and transportation of synthetic fertilizers.

Drawing on peer-reviewed research, Locke says approximately 240 million smallholder farms making the transition to regenerative agriculture across an estimated 480 million hectares could eventually remove every year up to 0.72 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually during the period in which soil carbon is actively accumulating.

Furthermore, reduced reliance on synthetic fertilizer could provide an additional climate benefit of roughly 0.1 gigaton of CO2 equivalent annually, bringing the estimated combined benefit to approximately 0.6 to 0.85 gigatons per year at mature adoption.

That is roughly comparable in scale to the annual CO2 emissions of global aviation.

Locke stresses that soils cannot absorb carbon indefinitely. Soil carbon generally accumulates over one to three decades before approaching a new equilibrium, and outcomes vary substantially with soils, climate, farming practices and farmers’ starting conditions.


“Regenerative agriculture is not a license to keep emitting carbon elsewhere,” says Locke. “Its climate potential is important precisely because it comes alongside other benefits we urgently need anyway: healthier soil, greater biodiversity, more resilient farms, increased food production and stronger rural communities.”
Measuring what “regenerative” actually means

The book arrives as regenerative agriculture is moving rapidly into the mainstream but still lacks a universally agreed definition.

Locke argues that this makes credible measurement especially important.

Rather than allowing a farm or company to be considered regenerative because it has adopted one favoured technique, Whole Earth Farming advocates assessing a broad range of environmental and social outcomes.

The book highlights the emerging “Regen10 Outcomes Framework,” developed through more than two years of global consultation, as an important step toward establishing a common reference for assessing regenerative agriculture while allowing farmers to choose methods appropriate to local circumstances.

The framework encompasses ecological health, farmer livelihoods, food quality, community resilience and other outcomes.

The distinction also guards against reducing regenerative agriculture to carbon alone.

A farming system that sequesters carbon while degrading biodiversity, water resources or farmer livelihoods, Locke argues, cannot meaningfully be called regenerative.
A great regenerative transformation

Locke calls the opportunity a “Great Regenerative Transformation,” comparable in ambition to the Green Revolution that dramatically increased agricultural production during the second half of the 20th century.

But there is a fundamental difference. Where the Green Revolution relied heavily on improved crop varieties, irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and increasing standardization, Locke envisions a transformation that combines traditional agricultural knowledge with ecological science, locally adapted practices and modern systems for measuring outcomes.

The goal is not simply more food per hectare. Success would instead be measured by what agriculture produces and what it leaves behind: healthier soils, restored ecosystems, greater biodiversity, improved water systems, climate resilience and viable farming communities.


Locke argues that smallholders are particularly well positioned to lead such a transformation because many retain traditional agricultural knowledge, operate diversified farms and have not adopted industrial farming systems as extensively as producers in wealthier countries.

The challenge is giving them access to the training, finance, research, markets, data and extension services needed to make that potential real.

Alongside its practical exploration of smallholder farming and regenerative agriculture, Whole Earth Farming makes a less expected case: that the Bahá’í Faith offers principles relevant to agriculture’s future; its teachings connect farming with humanity’s spiritual, social and economic development.

Locke focuses particularly on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, who from 1901 to 1921 directed the farming community of ‘Adasíyyih in the Jordan Valley. He argues that practices used there anticipated many now associated with regenerative agriculture, including crop rotation, agroforestry, integrated livestock and soil-building, while applying broader principles of equality, consultation and justice.

Locke extends these ideas globally, arguing that the faith’s principle that “the earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens” provides a framework for treating farmers, governments, companies and international institutions as parts of an interdependent agricultural system. He stresses that the principles require no religious belief, describing them as “open-source foundational truths” that could help regenerative agriculture scale across cultures, continents and generations without fragmenting into competing definitions.
“Not a measure of the problem, but a measure of the possibility”

The book carries a foreword by Roy Steiner, Senior Vice President, Food Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation, who describes the world’s 475 million smallholder farming households as “not a measure of the problem, but as a measure of the possibility.”

Steiner writes that regenerative transformation cannot be reduced to carbon or measured by crop yield alone, and that it cannot succeed without farmers themselves being active agents of change.

The book has also drawn endorsements from leaders spanning agriculture, humanitarian action, conservation, development and public policy.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton says Locke shares lessons from his work with smallholders “with both rigorous evidence and genuine humanity.”

Chef and humanitarian José Andrés writes that farmers have the power not only to produce food but to strengthen local economies and nourish the future, concluding: “Read this book. Then do something.”

Other contributions and endorsements have been provided by Elizabeth Dowdeswell, former UN Environment Programme Executive Director and Lieutenant Governor of Ontario;
Danielle Nierenberg, Food Tank President;
Rainn Wilson, actor and environmental advocate, who wrote the introduction;
Paula Caldwell St-Onge, former Canadian Ambassador to Haiti;
Tara Shyam, Executive Director of Regen10; and
Leaders from organizations working in agriculture, food security, reforestation and international development.

The book includes 21 stories from 18 countries illustrating regenerative agriculture through the experiences of farmers and farming communities rather than presenting it solely as an abstract global model.

Its examples range from Colombia and Thailand to Canada, the Netherlands and farming communities across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Launched during Climate Week NYC, Whole Earth Farming offers a deceptively simple proposition: The world need not choose between feeding more people and restoring the planet. It’s possible to do both if hundreds of millions of farmers who have long operated at the margins of agricultural policy are finally given the means.
By the numbers

570 million – Approximate number of farms worldwide.

475 million – Smallholder farms in the Global South with less than two hectares (five acres).

~2 billion – People living and working on those smallholder farms, approximately one-quarter of humanity.

30% – Approximate share of the world’s food already produced by smallholders.

1.5 billion – Approximate increase in world population expected by 2050, concentrated in developing countries.

240 million – Smallholder farming families the book proposes supporting in a global regenerative transition.

12% – Approximate share of global arable land those farms would cultivate.

0.48–0.72 gigatons CO2/year – Estimated potential annual soil carbon removal at mature adoption during the active accumulation period.

0.6–0.85 gigatons CO2e/year – Estimated combined mature annual climate benefit when avoided emissions associated with reduced synthetic fertilizer use are included.


10,000 – Approximate number of Smallholder Farmers Alliance members in Haiti.

1 million – Approximate number of trees planted annually by SFA members.

21 stories / 18 countries – Farmer and regenerative agriculture stories featured in Whole Earth Farming.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for BAHAI

Louisiana Residents Are Resisting Plans to Build ICE Jail on Contaminated Site

Organizers are hard at work to convince officials to roll back an agreement with a private prison operator.

By Frances Madeson ,

Truthout

September 12, 2026

Anti-ICE and Border Patrol protestors disrupt a city council meeting before being removed by New Orleans Police Department officers at City Hall in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 4, 2025.Adam GRAY / AFP via Getty Images

The Alexandria International Airport, which is part of England Airpark in central Louisiana, is currently known as the busiest ICE Air Operations hub for deportations in the United States. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Alexandria Staging Facility, a terminus for people being removed from the U.S., is reviled the world over by abused and deported refugees from Cameroon to Haiti. Even as the town’s tourism office works in overdrive to entice visitors to the area’s natural and cultural attractions — the scenic Red River, lush butterfly gardens, and historic homes such as the one where venerated Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps lived from birth to three years old — violence against immigrants keeps coming.

Last year, Alexandria was mentioned in a lawsuit regarding a child with Stage 4 kidney cancer who was deported along with two siblings in April 2025. Now, the same polarizing federal agency that has killed people on the streets and in its custody is planning to expand its operations in Alexandria. ICE has grabbed another chunk of the England Airpark, which is situated on a former U.S. Air Force base that shuttered in 1992 due to groundwater contaminated with catastrophic levels of PFAS, a class of persistent “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, reproductive harms, and other serious health problems.

If ICE has its way, as soon as the end of September, it aims to place immigrant women (including those who are pregnant), infants, and children, on top of this toxic site in a 528-bed facility, to be housed in a former military barracks. To further sully the atmosphere, ICE has contracted with the LaSalle Family Foundation, an affiliate of the private prison operator LaSalle Corrections, which runs the Irwin Detention Center in Georgia. A congressional investigation found ample evidence of rampant medical abuse at the facility, including medically unnecessary gynecological procedures performed on migrant women.

Louisiana residents are mobilizing in opposition to the immigration jail with the help of CENLA Activism, a grassroots group of concerned residents that mobilizes activists in central Louisiana and organizes mutual aid for communities under siege by ICE.

At the center of this scheme is England Economic and Industrial Development District (EEIDD), an independent political subdivision of the State of Louisiana charged with taking over and redeveloping the England Air Force Base after it was decommissioned.

EEIDD, the governing authority for England Airpark, has a board of commissioners who are all appointed by the mayors of Alexandria and Pineville, the Central Louisiana Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Rapides Parish officials. The 10 commissioners, all men, were persuaded last February to rubber-stamp the contract for the ICE jail. Their executive director Ralph Hennessy told Verite News that “the facilities are set up like a traditional dorm room,” and said to ABC affiliate WBRZ that it would bring an economic benefit to the Airpark.

As Hennessy put it: “There are a lot of people in Central Louisiana that make a living off of the immigration world, the prison world.” ICE will pay EEIDD, the district he works for, $530,000 annually. In May, Hennessy’s own base salary rose from $209,615 to $240,000.

Since learning of EEIDD’s plan to allow ICE to detain children in their community, mothers, grandmothers, Christian clergywomen, and educators organizing with CENLA Activism have showed up to EEIDD board meetings, and they have no intention of letting up. They’ve channeled their fury into demonstrations to raise public awareness in heavily trafficked parts of town on the National Day of Action: ICE Out Visibility Event, and have held prayer services that have often brought participants to tears. Pastor Leah Rachal said at an August 25 service she helped organize: “We might disagree on some of the other minutiae of immigration policy. But not this. Nobody wants children to be detained.”

At an August 27 EEIDD board of commissioners meeting, where more than 100 Louisianans packed the overflow room, Rose Marie Norton greeted board chair Oday Lavergne as “the heart of Alexandria” and reminded him, “The protests aren’t necessarily against you; they’re against the system.”

Other community members addressed board members as “brothers,” and cautioned them to think carefully about who will be blamed for any tragic mishap. In every possible way — through prayer, song, even curses — the participants suggested that the board may be taking moral or legal liability by attaching themselves to ICE’s towering pile of collateral damage.

“This will come back to haunt you,” Colleen Buras from Baton Rouge said to the board. “The administration has gone rogue. There’s a lot of policy that is being condemned in the courts. It takes a long time for these things to be adjudicated. Ultimately, you guys will be responsible for what happens in your detention centers.”

Bentley Hensel, a local accountability journalist, explained in his piece for The Kingfish Project how the murkiness of many of the terms and unusual conditions in the “cooperative endeavor agreement” for the jail seemed structured to disadvantage EEIDD’s board over LaSalle or ICE. For instance, Hensel noted, EEIDD has a right to inspect the premises, but not to audit LaSalle’s operating books. Hensel, who grew up in the area and has recently returned, said that in addition to the “unauditability” red flag, there has been an opaque process in which crucial documents were not shared as the board of commissioners went headlong toward an almost unanimous approval.

Marty Floyd, a veteran, retired biologist, and longtime resident of Rapides Parish, told Truthout he fears Alexandria will be permanently stained by what ICE is doing in the town he’s lived in since the 1990s, and he considers it “un-American.”

“I swore an oath to protect the public from foreign and domestic problems. And to me, this is going against that oath. I’ve got to stand up and say something.”

ACLU Louisiana’s communication specialist Jesse Vad drove from New Orleans to attend the August 27 meeting in Alexandria because the board was considering an anticipatory 19-page ordinance curtailing protest at the England Airpark. It unanimously passed, over an avalanche of community objection. Vad said the move to stifle the right to assembly appeared to many of the attendees as if the board were preemptively acknowledging that there will be atrocities that merit mass protest. A number of commenters scoffed at the ordinance and said that if children are harmed, nothing will stop them from assembling freely to demand accountability wherever and whenever necessary.

Vad told Truthout he doesn’t think the board has been given all the facts about the reality of Louisiana’s detention centers.

“I don’t think there’s a single facility in this state that isn’t just absolutely atrocious, unlawful conditions. You know, horrendous incidents at every single one … the board of commissioners and ICE have tried to dress this up as something different,” Vad said. “Nobody believes that. There’s just no reason to believe that.”

Daniel Nakamura drives two hours from the small city of Ruston whenever CENLA Activism puts the word out. But he came specifically to the August 27 meeting because of his family’s experience during World War II. His parents, Yosh and Grace Nakamura — both born in the U.S., both American citizens — were nevertheless rounded up with other 120,000 Japanese Americans and interned in concentration camps when they were in their late teens.

“My dad’s family was at Gila River in Arizona and my mother’s in Manzanar in California,” he said.

Writing in Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, author Michi Nishiura Weglyn, describes the harrowing reality at Manzanar: “A WRA investigation conducted in the summer of 1942 had revealed: The guards have been instructed to shoot anyone who attempts to leave the Center without a permit, and who refuses to halt when ordered to do so. The guards are armed with guns that are effective at range of up to 500 yards.” Later that same year, sentries shot and wounded 10 people and killed two — Henry Ito, a 17-year-old from Los Angeles and James Kanegawa, 21 from Tacoma.

“They had a kind of trick question: Do you renounce your loyalty to them? It seems like there’s a lot of trickery with the way immigration’s practiced right now,” Nakamura said.

Nakamura says he’s buoyed by the idea that odious places such as Alligator Alcatraz were closed by a lot of scrutiny. “But you know,” he said, “a lot of pain happened up to that point, and knowing that it might happen to women and children, this is unacceptable.”
A Chance to Walk Back the Deal

Mich González, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center in New Orleans, assists immigrants who are voluntarily deporting themselves to keep their families safe and intact. He was invited to Alexandria by the locally led movement to help them share expert information about the reality of the new ICE jail and how bad it would be for the town’s image and, as some said, its soul.

González, who was escorted out of the previous board meeting while delivering passionate testimony, told Truthout he’s already conveyed to the commissioners that the deal they made with ICE is by no means a “done deal” unless they want it to be. “I already let them know at the July meeting, attorneys can help get them out of the contracts,” he said.

After his second look at the board in action, González responded with sympathy: “These guys are in over their heads, and I think some of them know it in their guts.”

He said about the commissioners, “It would be a mistake for them to think there is any serious oversight over ICE from the U.S. Office of Inspector General or the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. They no longer do that. ICE is its own overseer. The commissioners must know this already; it’s old news that there is no oversight.”

González told Truthout that if the commissioners were his clients, he would advise them to unwind these contracts on the basis that they did not have sufficient information and understanding to vote for them on behalf of the town. Later they won’t be able to say they didn’t know.

“At the end of the day, you know what it is. You know it’s an arm of a private prison company. You know it’s an intergovernmental service agreement. You know that it’s an ICE detention center.”

Erin Tracy, who moved back home to Alexandria permanently in 2024, and founded CENLA Activism with her mother in advance of the first No Kings Rally in June 2025, is also noticing a change due to activism.

“We are seeing some of these board members start … to ask more questions,” Tracy told Truthout. “Because something they have not been doing is asking the right questions. They just see the money and think it’s going to help people, but it’s not. It’s just negative attention on our town, and we don’t want that. We have to live here. This is not the economy we want. This is not what we want to profit off of.”

She said that ICE abuses in Alexandria are not limited to the holding station at the Airpark.

“I have a friend whose entire family essentially has been taken and deported to Mexico,” she said. “We have a big community where there’s a bunch of plant nurseries that are staffed by Latinos, and they are very much in danger. One of our local Hispanic markets has had to close. I know of another one where the owner’s husband is now in ICE detention.”

It’s seemingly made no difference to ICE when immigrants have documents or when they have no criminal record. “There’s no discretion,” she said.

“Organizations that are responsible for a lot of death and violence are coming in and saying ‘We’re gonna hold children here and don’t worry we’re gonna protect them,’” she said. “Why would I ever believe that?”

In fact, she thinks that’s backwards.

“It’s we who have to protect our neighbors,” Tracy said.

Tracy was happily surprised that at the August 27 meeting it was announced that a special meeting would be held on September 8 to give everyone an opportunity to speak about the proposed staging area — something they had not previously allowed. But as the days passed, she became concerned that though a majority of the board members signed a letter in favor of the special meeting, one week later it had not been publicly announced.

Sheri Scallan, England Airpark’s Communications Manager wrote in an email to Truthout that she had no details about the time or venue for the special meeting. Two days letter a press release announced the meeting’s cancelation with no explanation. Scallan did not respond to a follow-up email asking for comment in response to activists’ concerns.

Now, CENLA Activism is sponsoring a community-led community forum of its own to call for an end to child detention.

“Our work will not end until this detention center project is shut down for good,” Tracy said.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Frances Madeson
Frances Madeson is a freelance movement journalist who’s been contributing to Truthout since August 2019. A generalist with a passion for authoritative writing in all genres, she is working in southern Illinois with others to formalize a new community land trust in Jackson County. Her journalism is collected at www.francesmadeson.com.

In direct appeal to Trump, Catholic bishops' president urges end of mass deportations of Haitians

(RNS) — The letter marks a shift toward a more direct and pointed tone in challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.

Community members hold a protest rally as immigrants enter an ICE facility at a Department of Homeland Security field office during a mandatory check in where most received ankle monitors, after thousands of Haitians lost Temporary Protected Status (TPS), in Blue Ash, Ohio on Aug. 9, 2026. (RNS photo/Carol Guzy)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain

September 9, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference president, sent a letter on Tuesday (Sept. 8), urging President Donald Trump to cease the deportation of “large numbers” of Haitian immigrants. 

Citing the violence in Haiti, Coakley wrote: “As citizens of this great country, we have been entrusted with a tremendous moral responsibility, and this is true most of all for you as our head of state, Mr. President. To this end, I respectfully ask: What good is the immense wealth, prosperity, and influence with which we have been blessed as a nation if not used in service of our humanity?”

The letter’s language marked a notable hardening in tone from the U.S. bishops’ conference, though Coakley also wrote that he was “humbly” appealing for Trump’s assistance. 

Last November, the U.S. bishops’ conference released a special pastoral message calling for an end to “indiscriminate mass deportation,” a sign of how seriously the conference is taking deportation policies that could impact nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Catholics directly or through their family. But that message did not name Trump.

In his letter this week, Coakley wrote that he was inspired by the massacre of 47 people in Haiti’s Kenscoff farming community to write. Some of the people killed had been taking refuge in a church, and some of those killed were children. Coakley called the violence “unconscionable.”

“I very much wish this recent and tragic example of human life being extinguished, virtually with impunity, was an irregularity in Haiti. Unfortunately, it is not,” Coakley wrote. He told Trump that deportations endanger “innocent human life” and “contribute to the country’s already deepening crisis.”

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meets with President Donald Trump at the White House on Jan. 12, 2026. (Official White House Photo)

Since the Trump administration revoked temporary protected status for Haitians in late July, an estimated 350,000 Haitians have been vulnerable to detention and deportation.  

Coakley did acknowledge that the administration could move forward with individual deportations “to advance justice and public safety.”

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RELATED: As Salvadoran TPS deadline nears, Hispanic Pentecostal leaders urge immigration protections

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The Oklahoma City archbishop has often been seen as a conservative, particularly because he is ecclesiastical adviser to the Napa Institute, which unites wealthy Catholics around conservative causes. Coakley’s letter to Trump indicated that he has spoken to the president about immigration before, referencing a previous conversation in which Coakley recognized “the importance of regulating immigration and enforcing federal immigration law.” 

Coakley met with Trump in January, the first time that the bishops’ conference president had met with the U.S. president in nearly a decade. Shortly afterward, the administration announced a change to the visa requirement that had forced foreign priests and other religious workers to exit the U.S. for a year between religious visas, which the conference had long sought.

Haitian immigrant Monsanto Maler, center, cries and collapses after receiving an ankle monitor at a Department of Homeland Security field office during a mandatory check in, on Aug. 9, 2026, in Blue Ash, Ohio. (RNS photo/Carol Guzy)

In this Tuesday letter, Coakley wrote, “the Catholic Church is sensitive to the fact that many families, especially mixed-status families, would benefit from ceasing the deportations. The strength of our communities depends, in large part, on the well-being of such families.” He also highlighted Haitian contributions to the economy and health care and invoked religious and patriotic ideals about the right to life. “I know you understand the essential role the United States plays in promoting the inherent value of human life,” he wrote to Trump.

He said that the U.S. bishops would continue to pray for and support immigration reform.

Other faith leaders have also expressed concerns about Haitians facing deportation, including more than 100 Pentecostal leaders who gathered in Washington earlier this week and a separate letter organized by the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and the National Association of Evangelicals urging an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.