This Is a Fight for Humanity’: Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize

“The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress,” one foundation leader said.


2026 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Alannah Acaq Hurley poses for a photo.
(Photo by Goldman Environmental Prize)

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Olivia Rosane
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced the six winners of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected wildlife, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement to halt the climate crisis.

The announcement comes as world leaders have failed to make progress in addressing environmental challenges, and President Donald Trump, leader of the world’s largest historical climate polluter, has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, rolled back climate and environmental regulations domestically, and made efforts to supercharge the extraction and use of fossil fuels.

“While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies—in the US and globally—it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,” John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress.”

The 2026 prize is notable because it marks the first time that all of the winners—Iroro Tanshi of Nigeria, Borim Kim of South Korea, Sarah Finch of the United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papau New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the US, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia—are women.

‘There’s lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been.“

“I am especially thrilled to honor our first-ever cohort of six women, as this is a powerful reflection of the absolutely central role that women play in the environmental community globally,” Goldman said.

The winners also exemplify the prize’s 2026 theme “Change Starts Where You Stand,” as each of them began with a fight to protect a local community or ecosystem that has global implications for the climate, biodiversity, and environmental justice.

As US-based winner Alannah Acaq Hurley said, “At the end of the day, this is a fight for humanity, and, honestly, our ability to continue as humans on this planet.”

Here is how six remarkable women waged this fight and won.

Iroro Tanshi

Iroro Tanshi is a Nigerian conservation ecologist who has worked successfully with local communities to protect endangered bats and their rainforest habitat from wildfires.

Tanshi was elated in 2016 when she discovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, previously believed to be extinct in the area, living in Nigeria’s Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. However, two weeks later, a devastating wildfire ignited, forcing Tanshi to evacuate and ultimately impacting around half of the park.

Tanshi then turned her attention to preventing wildfires, which are sparked by traditional farming practices rubbing against the climate crisis.

“The way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but climate change has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall and people can no longer predict when to burn safely,” she explained in a video.

Tanshi and her team worked with local communities on a Zero Wildfire Campaign, which includes educating farmers on when it is safe to burn and forming a team of “forest guardians” to patrol and fight fires on high-risk days. Due to her efforts, these guardians put out 74 fires between 2022 and 2025, preventing any of them from becoming major blazes.

“My hope for the future is that people would take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like,” she said. “Let’s stay nimble. Let’s try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground.”

Borim Kim

Borim Kim helped win Asia’s first successful youth climate lawsuit, inspiring people across the region to demand government action on climate.

Kim was first motivated to take collective action when a heatwave baked Seoul in 2018, killing 48 people including a woman near her mother’s age, who died in her home.

“I realized that even home wasn’t safe from the climate crisis,” she said in a video. “I started looking for what I could do.”

Inspired by the international youth climate movement, she founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and helped organize school strikes and walkouts. After her activism led to meetings with policymakers, she realized that national leaders had no real plans to address the climate crisis. In 2020, she and Y4CA mobilized 19 young people to sue the South Korean government for violating the constitutional rights of future generations. Once the case was launched, she also continued to build a social movement for climate action.

In August 2024, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the young people, mandating that South Korea reduce its emissions in line with the scientific consensus, a decision the environmental minister accepted. The ruling is projected to prevent between 1.6-2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.

“Youth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely and the state’s duty to protect us,” Kim said.

Sara Finch

On the other side of the world, Sarah Finch also secured a precedent-setting legal climate victory.

Finch lives in a part of southeastern England called the Weald. While it is currently a rural area, it hosts oil and gas reserves that were eyed for exploitation during the fracking boom of the 2010s. Finch helped form the Weald Action Group to push back against many potential wells, but they were not able to stop the Surrey County Council from approving the operation and expansion of a drilling site called Horse Hill in 2018.

In gearing up to challenge the decision, Finch discovered that the council’s environmental impact statement had only considered emissions from direct drilling at the site, but not the emissions generated from the burning of the fuel once it was extracted, also known as Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 90% of oil and gas’ contribution to the climate emergency.

“It became apparent that it was actually the norm that Scope 3 emissions were being emitted from these kinds of decisions, and we realized that actually it was happening everywhere and in much bigger developments than Horse Hill,” Finch said in a video.

She and her team challenged the environmental impact statement over its failure to consider Scope 3 emissions, losing multiple times before finally securing a groundbreaking victory from the UK Supreme Court in 2024, which has come to be known as “the Finch ruling.”

The UK government cited the “Finch ruling” when it revoked its backing of two North Sea oil developments. Overall, the projects canceled or delayed in 2024 due to the ruling would have generated enough Scope 3 emissions to equal the UK’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions that year.

“It wasn’t just a win on Horse Hill,” Finch said. “It wasn’t even just a win on a handful of sites. It was a win on the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry. And I feel like, there’s lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been.”

Theonila Roka Matbob

Theonila Roka Matbob was born into an environmental disaster. Rio Tinto’s Panguna Mine had devastated the ecosystem of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB), destabilized its society, and led to a civil war that killed 15,000-20,000 Bougainvilleans, including her father.

“Our environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured were my people,” Roka Matbob said in a video.

Rio Tinto closed its copper, silver, and gold mine in 1989 due to the war, but had done nothing to clean up the 150,000 tons of tailings it had dumped into local rivers or take responsibility for the havoc the mine had caused. As an adult, Roka Matbob began to wonder why justice had not been done and to gather testimony from people impacted by the mine.

This led to a successful campaign that persuaded Rio Tinto first to fund an assessment of the mine’s impacts and then to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2024 to act on the assessment’s findings and develop a plan with local communities to remediate the area.

“It doesn’t mean we will restore everything as it was, but at least the story that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren can remember [is] that our grandparents fought,” she said.

Alannah Acaq Hurley

As Theonila Roka Matbob secured justice for the impacts of one major mine, Alannah Acaq Hurley helped prevent another one from being dug in the first place.

Hurley grew up as a member of the Yup’ik Indigenous group in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a haven of biodiversity that also hosts the world’s largest wild sockeye salmon run. But in 2001 a new danger emerged: Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals announced plans to construct the Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit mine in North America.

“The pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon,” Hurley said in a video. “It didn’t take long for us to understand the level of threat that this mine posed—acid mine drainage, toxic tailings left in perpetuity. It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when.”

Chosen to lead the United Tribes of Bristol Bay in 2013, Hurley built a coalition to oppose the mine, uniting tribes, commercial fishers, and environmentalists to make their cause to the US Environmental Protection Agency and push back against the company’s multiple attempts to move forward with the copper-and-gold mining project. Finally, in 2023, the EPA canceled the project via its rarely used veto power.

“It’s just really a testament to the power of the people,” she said. “We just never stopped until we were heard.”

Yuvelis Morales Blanco

Yuvelis Morales Blanco also defended her community from an extractive industry.

Blanco was born to subsistence fishers on Colombia’s Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches.

“We had nothing but the river—she was like a mother who took care of me,” she said in a statement.

However, even as a child she saw the river was threatened by oil spills from Ecopetrol, Colombia’s leading oil company headquartered nearby. The potential threat level was raised even further when she learned while attending college in 2019 that Ecopetrol planned to build two pilot fracking projects near Puerto Wilches.

“Man, I’m like, ‘They’re going to do that in Wilches?’ No sir!’” she recalled in a video.

Blanco joined the Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance and began to raise awareness in her community about the plans. As the campaign’s momentum grew, so did her reputation as a spokesperson. This ultimately led to threats of violence against her that forced her to seek asylum in France in 2022, yet she continued to mobilize against the fracking plans from abroad.

She and the alliance saw success in 2022, as a local court halted the permitting process, newly elected President Gustavo Petro pledged there would be no fracking during his administration, and Ecopetrol suspended its contracts. In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court further ruled that the fracking projects had violated the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches’ right to free, prior, and informed consent.

Blanco continues to fight for a ban on fracking and for legal protections for environmental defenders—over 140 of whom were reported missing or killed in 2024, the most recent year for which Global Witness has a full tally. Colombia was also the most dangerous countries for defenders that year, with 48 deaths.

“I am very hopeful because I have a river that always accompanies me, and I know we’re going to win,” she said.

The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by Rhoda and Richard Goldman, and has since honored 239 winners in 37 years. The 2026 awards will be presented live in San Francisco on Monday evening at 8:30 pm ET. Watch it on YouTube here.

‘Threats of War Crimes Cannot Be Normalized’: Trump Ripped for Renewed Iran Genocide Threats

“Trump’s repeated threats to destroy civilian infrastructure are not negotiation, they’re reckless escalations that endanger millions,” said one group.



Brett Wilkins
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As Iran reversed course on reopening the Strait of Hormuz amid continued US and Israeli provocations, President Donald Trump renewed threats to destroy Iran and its civilian infrastructure, prompting calls on Monday for the US leader to stop threatening to commit war crimes—and for Americans to not normalize such criminal behavior.

Trump was embarrassed on the world stage after declaring Friday that it was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD” because “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again.”


All Nations, World Bodies ‘Must Urgently Intervene’ to Stop Trump From Wiping Out Iran: Amnesty

While Iran’s government did agree to fully reopen the vital Mideast waterway—through which around 20% of the world’s oil is shipped—on Friday, Trump’s continued blockade of Iran’s ports and rampant Israeli ceasefire violations in Lebanon led to Tehran shutting down the strait again and accusing the United States of “acts of piracy and maritime theft.”

Iranian naval vessels subsequently opened fire on a pair of Indian-flagged ships attempting to travel through the strait Saturday, allegedly after giving at least one of them permission to transit the waterway.

The following day, US forces attacked and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman.

Two weeks after his genocidal threat to wipe out the “whole civilization” of Iran, Trump took to his Truth Social network on Sunday to renew vows to commit war crimes if the Iranian government does not sign a peace deal by Wednesday.

“If they don’t sign the deal, then the whole country is going to get blown up,” the president said. “We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”

Responding to Trump’s post, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said Monday on social media: “Threats of war crimes cannot become normalized. Trump’s repeated threats to destroy civilian infrastructure are not negotiation, they’re reckless escalations that endanger millions.”

“The president must abandon this pattern immediately and pursue a serious, lawful, diplomatic strategy grounded in legitimate de-escalation,” NIAC added.

Threats to commit war crimes such as blowing up entire countries or destroying civilian infrastructure can, like the acts themselves, be illegal under international law.

“If you follow illegal orders to commit war crimes, you will be prosecuted by a future administration,” Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.)—who served in the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps—said in a Sunday message to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Bombing ‘every single power plant, and every single bridge’ would violate proportionality principle and cause excessive civilian harm, which is a war crime.”

However, US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz on Sunday defended Trump’s statements, citing American actions in World War II—which included waging the world’s only nuclear war and carpet-bombing of German and Japanese cities that killed more people than the atomic bombs—to justify the president’s threats.

Waltz also claimed that “the Iranian regime... and its terrorist proxies have a long history of actually deliberately hiding military infrastructure in hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, and other civilian assets,” comments that came as Israeli forces continued their attacks on all of those civilian structures and more in Gaza and Lebanon. Iranians are also reeling from US and Israeli attacks, many of them on civilian infrastructure, that officials in Tehran and human rights groups say have killed as many as 1,700 noncombatantas, including hundreds of women and children.

Trump’s continued blockade and renewed threats come as Pakistan on Monday pushed for a resumption of peace talks, with Pakistani officials saying Iran has signaled its willingness to send a delegation to Islamabad for negotiations. If Tehran agrees to new talks, Vice President JD Vance is expected to lead a US delegation to Pakistan whose members would likely include Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Iranian officials have slammed the unreliability of the Trump administration—which has twice waged war on Iran right when deals were in sight, according to international mediators.

“Iranians do not submit to force,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Monday.

‘Hateful, Bigoted’ Chip Roy Introduces MAMDANI Act in Congress

“Blatant Islamophobia aside, Roy’s staff probably wasted days trying to land this acronym,” said one observer.


Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) speaks at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on March 4, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Journalists and rights advocates reacted on Monday with a mix of bemusement and anger over US Rep. Chip Roy’s display of “blatant Islamophobia” as the Texas Republican introduced a bill that appeared as intent on personally targeting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as it was on unconstitutionally expelling immigrants from the US over certain political and religious views.

“Blatant Islamophobia aside, Roy’s staff probably wasted days trying to land this acronym,” said Ravi Mangla, press secretary for the Working Families Party, after Roy unveiled the Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists (MAMDANI) Act.

According to Roy, the legislation would enact “sweeping” changes to US immigration law that would deport, denaturalize, and deny US citizenship or entry to any immigrant “who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”



The bill was introduced nearly four months after Mamdani was sworn in to office. Roy had suggested that the political rise of the democratic socialist, who is a Muslim immigrant from Uganda, risked bringing what he believes to be “Sharia law”—actually a broadly defined set of personal theological and ethical guidelines rather than a national law—to the US.

In reality, Mamdani has taken steps toward enacting a universal childcare program, opening a network of city-owned grocery stores to compete with corporations, and convincing the state to tax the second homes of wealthy New Yorkers.

The legislation introduced Monday comes days after a Washington Post analysis found that Roy has been particularly fixated on promoting the view that allowing Muslims to immigrate to the US and practice their religion—in accordance with the US Constitution—will harm the nation.

Including one recent post that explicitly said, “No more Muslims,” Roy has posted from his campaign and official accounts about Muslims, Islam, and “Sharia law” more than 244 times since January—more than any other member of Congress, including Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has faced called to resign for numerous anti-Muslim comments that have attacked public figures like Rep. Ilham Omar (D-Minn.).

The Council on American Islamic Relations said in a report last month that last year, it received 8,683 complaints from people facing anti-Muslim bias or attacks—the highest number of complaints in a single year since the group began compiling civil rights reports in 1996. Employment discrimination was the most common complaint, with immigration and asylum discrimination and hate incidents rounding out the top three.



Gun control and human rights advocate Cameron Kasky said that “many moderate Democrats and the mainstream media have played a pivotal role in normalizing this dangerous, escalatory Islamophobia.”

A number of influential establishment Democrats suggested Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral race last year could endanger Jewish New Yorkers, and refused to endorse him. Party leaders also continue to support arming Israel—which has spent the last two-and-a-half years attacking Palestinians in Gaza and has now returned to assaulting Lebanon—claiming the Israeli government needs US weapons to defend itself against other countries and groups in majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East.

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) warned that while Roy’s bill targets socialists and Muslims whom the congressman says subscribe to “fundamentalism,” the party will likely “expand their list of targets—little by little, hoping you do not notice—until their is no one left to stand against their agenda.”

“ Fascism,” she said, “ALWAYS requires a public enemy.”

Named for Mamdani, GOP Bill Would Strip Citizenship From People Who Advocate for Socialism

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.


US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Rep. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) participate in a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on April 01, 2025 in Washington, DC. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet and the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government held a joint hearing to investigate judicial overreach and limits on federal courts.
(Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann
Apr 21, 2026

Common Dreams


Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”

The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.

“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”

“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.

“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)

“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.

We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.

But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.

In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.

That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.

I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.

Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.

The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.

That goes all the way back to trying to overturning the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.

Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing clearance Thomas’s recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”

That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.

This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.

We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.

The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.

There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.

It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”

And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.

Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.

Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.

Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.

The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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Why a Feminist and Just Energy Transition Is the Only Way Out of the Climate Crisis

As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it.


Thousands of people take part in the so-called “Great People’s March” in the sidelines of the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference in Belem, Para State, Brazil on November 15, 2025.
(Photo by Pablo Porciuncula/ AFP via Getty Images)

Theiva Lingam
Apr 21, 2026

Common Dreams


Wars, invasions, blockades, and genocide from Venezuela and Iran to Palestine have ripped the curtain off the inherent volatility and violence of the fossil energy system. We need a rapid and just scale-up of socially controlled renewables to end the era of fossil fuels. But ensuring a just transition requires deeper conversation. Who benefits from the energy transition? Who bears the cost? Who gets a say in how energy is produced? These are also feminist questions about power, labor, care, and whose lives are valued.

To answer them, grassroots leaders, Indigenous communities, trade unions, and environmental justice activists will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia for the Peoples’ Summit and First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this week. For many of us in environmental and social justice movements, this gathering represents both urgency and possibility. This will be a critical space because, without justice, the energy transition will reproduce the same systems of extraction, control, and violence.

So We Must Ask: an Energy Transition for Whom?

The transition narrative sold by corporations and rich countries today tells us we can scale up corporate, market-led renewable energy technologies without questioning who controls them, who benefits, and who bears the cost. This risks the transition becoming nothing more than the old model in greener packaging. In Malaysia, for example, the energy transition policy largely rebrands the old growth-and-extraction model. It uses green rhetoric, prioritizing corporate-led false solutions like carbon capture and storage and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Copying Western-style developments through corporate-driven trade and investment patterns sustains fossil fuel dependence and continues to entrench structural inequalities both nationally and internationally. Without systemic change, the transition becomes another chapter in a long history of resource plunder, particularly in the Global South.

Consider the surge in demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. These are essential components of batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. Governments and corporations in the Global North are racing to secure these materials, often greenwashing extraction as necessary for climate action, while diverting these minerals into military, aerospace, AI, and data centers. For communities across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this rush is already translating into land grabs, water depletion, labor exploitation, and violence. Lithium extraction threatens fragile ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods; cobalt mining has been linked to dangerous working conditions and child labor. As with oil before them, critical minerals are becoming objects of geopolitical competition—backed by military power and strategic control.

If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.

The military is among the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels, yet its emissions are routinely excluded from national reporting. At the same time, states and corporations work together to secure control over oil, gas, and critical minerals—profiting from war and devastation from Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba.

These are the very predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes profit over energy as a right for people. A just transition must go far beyond emissions reductions. It must actively confront inequality, redistribute power, and wealth, and repair historical and ongoing harms. It must center those who have been marginalized and exploited—not as victims but as leaders.

A Just Transition Must Be Based on Peoples’ Sovereignty and Energy Sovereignty

At the heart of this vision are peoples’ sovereignty and energy sovereignty: the right of communities to control their lands, resources, and energy systems, and to shape the decisions that affect their lives. This means treating energy as a common good that is managed for collective well-being rather than private profit, while building energy democracy, where communities have real decision-making power over how energy is produced and used. It also requires energy sufficiency, prioritizing meeting people’s needs over excessive and wasteful energy use. Together, these principles challenge the concentration of power in corporations and wealthy countries, and point toward energy systems that are locally rooted, democratic, and aligned with social and ecological needs.

Achieving this also requires that we confront imperialism. The current global order allows wealthy countries to externalize the social and environmental costs of their consumption to the Global South, while maintaining control over finance, technology, and trade. This imbalance shapes the terms of the energy transition, devastating communities and often locking countries in the Global South into roles as raw material suppliers rather than equal partners.

Policies that ignore power dynamics may deliver short-term emissions reductions, but they will ultimately fail as communities resist exploitation and inequity deepens. A transition rooted in justice, however, can build the broad-based support needed for transformative change.

Around the world, communities are already practicing energy sovereignty, from managing decentralized renewable systems in Palestine to asserting their rights against extractive projects in Mozambique. Alternatives are not only possible, but underway.

A feminist and just energy transition must challenge the structures that perpetuate dependency and inequality, including unfair trade agreements, debt regimes, and corporate impunity. It must also recognize and address the intersecting forms of oppression based on gender, race, class, and colonial history that shape how the climate crisis is experienced and resisted.

As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it. If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.

The path forward will require confronting entrenched interests and reimagining our economies and societies. From Santa Marta and beyond, communities are showing us the way. The task now is to listen, to act, and to ensure that the transition ahead is truly just—for people, for the planet, and for future generations.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Theiva Lingam is chair of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental federation. She is also a public interest lawyer, environmental activist, and legal adviser to Sahabat Alam Malaysia-Friends of the Earth Malaysia, as well as a legal consultant at Third World Network.
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NIXON'S ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

Mike Johnson to Unleash ‘Catastrophic’ Attack on Endangered Species Act

“When wildlife is already under immense pressure from habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, and industrial development, Congress should be strengthening the Endangered Species Act,” said one advocate.


A female northern spotted owl catches a mouse on a stick held by Mark Higley, wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, on the Hoopa Valley Reservation on August 28, 2024.
(Photo by The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Conservationists warned Monday that “Earth Day could become Extinction Day” if Republican leaders in the US House of Representatives get their way.

Elected Republicans have long set their sights on the historic Endangered Species Act of 1973—and wildfire defenders sounded the alarm in December, when the Republican-led House Natural Resources Committee advanced Chair Bruce Westerman’s (R-Ark.) ESA Amendments Act.



“If this bill passes, protections for species like the Florida manatee, monarch butterfly, and California spotted owl would immediately decrease,” Earthjustice legislative director for lands, wildlife, and oceans Addie Haughey warned at the time.

Since then, President Donald Trump has continued his war on endangered species with his budget request for the 2027 fiscal year, and his administration’s so-called “God Squad” unanimously approved an “unprecedented” exemption allowing fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico to ignore ESA protections.

Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) plans to take up Westerman’s bill this week—potentially on Wednesday, Earth Day.

“At a time when wildlife is already under immense pressure from habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, and industrial development, Congress should be strengthening the Endangered Species Act, not tearing it apart,” said Jewel Tomasula, policy director of the Endangered Species Coalition, which has hundreds of member organizations.

“If Rep. Bruce Westerman and Speaker Johnson have their way, Earth Day will become Extinction Day,” Tomasula warned. “The urgency is real. This bill is catastrophic for threatened and endangered species.”

Susan Holmes, the coalition’s executive director, emphasized that “the Endangered Species Act works because it is rooted in science and because it recognizes a simple truth: Once a species is gone, it is gone forever.”

“We should not allow politicians to dismantle protections that have saved bald eagles, gray whales, peregrine falcons, and so many other species from disappearing forever,” she declared.

Holmes also noted that “the American people overwhelmingly support the Endangered Species Act” and “understand that protecting wildlife is not a partisan issue. It is about responsibility, stewardship, and ensuring that future generations inherit a world still rich with wild species and wild places.”

Polling commissioned by IFAW and conducted online last year by Beekeeper Group found that over three-quarters of Americans say they are concerned about the environment, the welfare of animals, and conserving nature, and specifically support the goals of the ESA. That aligns with figures from surveys conducted over the past three decades, according to a 2025 analysis.

“Protecting the nation’s wildlife and habitats has never been an issue of right or left—it is a shared value and a commitment to future generations,” said Cassie Ferri, legislative analyst at Defenders of Wildlife, in a Monday statement. “Instead of honoring Earth Day, Congress is turning it into ‘Destroy Earth Day’ by attempting to dismantle one of our nation’s most foundational conservation laws. We all depend on healthy ecosystems to thrive, and the vast majority of Americans want to preserve wildlife through a strong Endangered Species Act—yet time and again Congress blatantly disregards their voices.”

The advocacy group director of legislative affairs, Mary Beth Beetham, said that “shameless attempts by some members of Congress to dismantle the Endangered Species Act demonstrate a profound disregard for how valuable this law is to wildlife conservation.”

“The Endangered Species Act isn’t just rhetoric—it’s proven effective and has safeguarded imperiled species for more than 50 years,” Beetham stressed. “This bill could be the driving force behind future extinctions and would set a dangerous precedent for wildlife legislation moving forward.”

Defenders of Wildlife is among nearly 300 groups that have signed on to a Monday letter—shared with Common Dreams by another signatory, Humane World for Animals—urging US House members to “vote NO on HR 1897, which is a damaging bill that would dramatically weaken the ESA and make it harder, if not impossible, to achieve the progress we must make to address the alarming rate of extinction our planet now faces.”

Westerman’s bill, the letter says, “would significantly rewrite key portions of the ESA to prioritize politics over science and inappropriately shift responsibility for key implementation decisions from the federal government to the states, many of which do not have sufficient resources or legal mechanisms in place to take the lead in conserving listed species.”

“It would place significant new administrative burdens on already overburdened agencies,” the letter continues. “It would turn the current process for listing and recovering threatened and endangered species into a far lengthier process that precludes judicial review of key decisions.”

While Republicans can pass legislation along party lines in the House, they usually need at least some Democratic support in the Senate—due to chamber rules, which can be changed—to send a bill to Trump’s desk.

As Trump Threatens Iran, Veterans Arrested Protesting ‘War Machine’ at US Capitol

“Continuing to help the war machine will only cause you more pain. There has never been a better time to reject those orders, and join a fight that matters.”


Veterans, military family members, and supporters are detained by US Capitol Police officers during an demonstration calling upon the Trump administration to end the war on Iran on April 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for About Face: Veterans Against The War)

Brad Reed
Apr 20, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Dozens of veterans were arrested by US Capitol Police on Monday after they occupied the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill to protest President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran.

During the protest, which was organized by a coalition of veterans groups, the demonstrators stood in the middle of the rotunda, holding red tulips and chanting anti-war slogans.

A video published by Reuters shows Capitol Police restraining the veterans and taking them into custody one by one.



One of the demonstrators arrested was Mike Prysner, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War (CCW) and a veteran of the 2003 Iraq War, who encouraged members of the US military to become conscientious objectors in a statement released ahead of the demonstration.

“The war I was sent to senselessly claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis,” said Prysner. “Like the other veterans here with me today, I have spent the last two decades wishing I could turn back the hands of time and refuse to go. Service members have that chance right now.”

Prysner then informed US service members that “conscientious objection is your legal right, and we have professional counselors who will fight to ensure you are approved and kept from deployment.”

Tyler Romero, conscientious objector client for CCW, said that he “decided to get arrested today because as someone who was a participant in a war machine that is responsible for untold suffering around the world, it is my duty to help put an end to it.”

Like Prysner, Romero also encouraged service members to declare themselves conscientious objectors.

“My advice to troops still serving is this,” he said, “This is the most important historical moment of our lifetime, and what you choose to do matters. I can tell you from experience that continuing to help the war machine will only cause you more pain. There has never been a better time to reject those orders, and join a fight that matters.”

Trump over the weekend renewed his threats to commit war crimes by bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure, including bridges and power plants, unless Iran agreed to a deal to give up its uranium enrichment capabilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“If they don’t sign the deal, then the whole country is going to get blown up,” Trump said.

Gaza Needs $71.4 Billion for Recovery as Genocide Sets Development Back 77 Years

Only a tiny fraction of the already inadequate $17 billion pledged for Gaza reconstruction via US President Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” has reportedly been received.


An aerial view shows Palestinians walking through the ruins of destroyed buildings in the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, on February 5, 2025.
(Photo by Khalil Ramzi Alkahlut/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A joint assessment published Monday by the European Union, United Nations, and World Bank found that an estimated $71.4 billion is needed over the next decade for recovery and reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, where 30 months of Israeli genocide has set human development back by an entire lifetime.

The Gaza Strip Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) states that the $71.4 billion figure includes an estimated $26.3 billion required over the next 18 months “to restore essential service, rebuild critical infrastructure, and support economic recovery.”




With Congress Back in DC, Sanders Plans Another Vote on Blocking US Weapons to Israel Over Genocide



With Aid Blocked and ‘At Least 2 Children a Day’ Killed or Maimed, NGOs Say Trump’s Gaza Ceasefire Is Failing

“Physical infrastructure damages are estimated at $35.2 billion, with economic and social losses amounting to $22.7 billion,” the report continues. “The hardest-hit sectors include housing, health, education, commerce, and agriculture. Over 371,888 housing units have been destroyed or damaged, more than 50% of hospitals are nonfunctional, nearly all schools destroyed or damaged, and the economy has contracted by 84% in Gaza.”

“Catastrophic impact on human development across Gaza... is estimated to have been set back by 77 years,” the RDNA states. “Around 1.9 million people have been displaced, often multiple times, and more than 60% of the population has lost their homes.”

“Women, children, persons with disabilities, and those with preexisting vulnerabilities bear the greatest burden,” the publication adds.

The new analysis follows a November 2025 UN Conference on Trade and Development report that found Israel’s assault on Gaza has caused “the most severe economic crisis ever recorded.”

The Israeli war has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; the strip in ruins; and most of its approximately 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.

“Over two years of conflict has resulted in more than 71,000 Palestinian fatalities and over 171,000 injured, and many are missing under the rubble,” the report notes.

With the vast majority of Gaza’s buildings damaged or destroyed, separate UN analyses have estimated that it could take as many as 80 years to rebuild the obliterated coastal exclave.

So far, roughly $17 billion in pledged funding has been announced through the so-called “Board of Peace” launched by US President Donald Trump, whose ideas for rebuilding Gaza have included kicking Palestinians out and turning the strip into what he called the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Only a “tiny fraction” of that already inadequate $17 billion has been received, Reuters reported earlier this month.

Trump Invokes Wartime Law to Fulfill ‘Wish List for Oil, Gas, and Coal Industries’

“Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects.”

THE THREE STOOGES

US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and President Donald Trump appear at an event in Washington, DC on March 4, 2026.
(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Apr 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


US President Donald Trump on Monday invoked wartime authority in an effort to boost domestic fossil fuel production—with the help of taxpayer funding—as his administration faces growing political backlash over gas price spikes, driven by the illegal assault on Iran.

The five presidential memos Trump signed cite his executive powers under the Cold War-era Defense Production Act, which gives the president the ability to expand and accelerate production of key supplies. Critics accused Trump of abusing his emergency authority, once again, to give handouts to an industry profiting massively from the Iran war, which the president launched without congressional authorization.


Windfall Tax on Big Oil Demanded as Trump’s Iran War Pads Profits of Fossil Fuel Giants


‘Opportunistic’ Fossil Fuel Execs Cashed In on Trump’s Iran War With Record Stock Sales

“President Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects at the expense of energy affordability and common sense,” said Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen. “Today’s unjustified suite of executive orders is a wish list for the oil, gas, and coal industries, who are already enjoying record profits under Trump’s Energy Unaffordability Agenda.”

“America is already—far and away—the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and the world’s largest petroleum and gas exporter,” Slocum added. “Promoting more fossil fuel exports at a time when Trump has failed to deliver affordable, sustainable energy for American communities is just another example of the president’s incompetent, failed energy policies.”

Trump’s memos aim to bolster petroleum, coal, and liquefied natural gas production, asserting that the nation’s “current inadequate and intermittent energy supply leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security.”

“Action to expand the domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability,” the memos state.

Trump signed the directives hours after he publicly disagreed with his own energy secretary’s assessment of when Americans can expect to see relief at the gas pump, where they’re paying over $4 per gallon on average nationwide. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Americans might not see significantly lower gas prices until next year; Trump claimed that assessment was “totally wrong,” even as economists warned of lasting impacts to US and global energy markets stemming from the Iran war.

The world’s largest oil and gas giants have profited massively from war-induced price spikes, with the biggest beneficiaries—including US-based Chevron and ExxonMobil—banking over $30 million an hour in windfall gains during the first month of the conflict.

Trump’s memos came days after a group of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced legislation aimed at shielding fossil fuel companies from legal action to hold them accountable for their central role in the climate emergency.

“Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in response to the bill. “If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?”

Parents of Iranian Kids Killed by US School Bombing Thank Pope Leo for Speaking Out Against War

“We write this letter to you with trembling hands and a heart full of pain, from amidst the ashes and ruins of the schools of the city of Minab.”


In this picture obtained from Iran’s ISNA news agency, mourners attend the funeral of children killed in a US strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran on March 3, 2026.
(Photo by Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Apr 20, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Parents of children killed in the US bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran released a letter on Sunday applauding Pope Leo XIV for speaking out against war and urging him to “continue to be the voice of the voiceless children.”

“We write this letter to you with trembling hands and a heart full of pain, from amidst the ashes and ruins of the schools of the city of Minab,” reads the letter, first reported by Iran’s PressTV. “We are the fathers and mothers of 168 children who, these days, instead of embracing the warm bodies of our children, press their burned bags and bloody notebooks to our chests; innocent children whose only crime was smiling in the classroom, but this crime, through the instigation and support of illogical warmongers, crashed down upon the heads of our innocent children.”

More than 100 children were killed in the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, along with teachers and parents. Preliminary findings from the Pentagon indicate that the US was responsible for the strike, though the Trump administration has not formally admitted fault or apologized for the deadly attack, which came on the first day of the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran. Human rights groups have said the bombing should be investigated as a war crime.

In recent weeks, Trump administration officials and US President Donald Trump himself have lashed out at Pope Leo for condemning the Iran war and the president’s genocidal threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, which the pope called “truly unacceptable.”

The pontiff has not backed down, saying last week that he “will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems.”

In their letter on Sunday, the parents of children killed in the Minab school bombing wrote to Pope Leo that “you, with an aching heart and a divine perspective, warned the awakened consciences of the world that ‘hate is increasing, violence is worsening, and many have lost their lives.’”

“Today, the empty chairs of the classrooms in Minab are bitter testaments to this very truth; a truth brought about by the making of American bombs directed by illogical warmongers,” they continued. “We thank you that amidst the tumult of war, you became the voice of righteousness and reminded everyone that lasting peace and tranquility are achieved ‘not through force and weapons, but through the path of dialogue and the genuine search for a solution for all.’”



The letter came as Trump issued fresh threats to indiscriminately bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure, further endangering a fragile ceasefire and the prospect of a lasting diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

According to Iranian authorities, the US-Israeli war has killed more than 3,300 people in Iran—including hundreds of children. Abbas Masjedi, the head of the Iranian Legal Medicine Organization, told PressTV that 40% of the bodies of Iranian victims were “initially unidentifiable due to the type of bombs and missiles” used by the US and Israeli militaries.