lands

Last February, I climbed into a Jeep and rumbled up a rocky shelf road that took me high above a breathtaking corner of the Mojave National Preserve. At the top was an old gold mine where an Australian company had recently restarted activities, looking for rare earth minerals.

The National Park Service had been embroiled in a years-long dispute with the company, Dateline Resources Ltd., alleging that it was operating the Colosseum Mine without authorization and had damaged the surrounding landscape with heavy equipment. Dateline said it had the right to work the mine under a plan its prior operators had submitted to the Bureau of Land Management decades before.

President Trump had taken office just weeks before my visit. Environmentalists told me the conflict posed an early test of how his administration would handle the corporate exploitation of public lands.

At the time, observers weren’t sure how things would shake out. Conserving public lands is one of the rare issues that’s popular on both sides of the political aisle, they pointed out.

Almost a year later, it’s clear that the Trump administration has sided with the corporations.

Trump directed the Department of Interior to inventory mineral deposits on federal lands and prioritize mining as the primary use of those lands. He instructed officials to dramatically fast-track permitting and environmental reviews for certain types of energy and critical minerals projects — and designated metallurgical coal a critical mineral, enabling companies that mine it to qualify for a lucrative tax credit.

His budget bill lowered the royalty rates companies must pay the government to extract coal, oil or gas from public lands and provided other financial incentives for such projects while reducing the authority of federal land managers to deny them.

Under the president’s direction, the DOI has opened up millions of acres of federal land to new coal leasing and moved to rescind both the 2021 Roadless Rule, which protects swaths of national forest lands from extractive activities by barring most new road construction, and the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which puts conservation and restoration on par with other uses of BLM land like mining, drilling and grazing.

The administration is seeking to roll back limitations on mining and drilling for specific pieces of public land, including portions of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the watershed feeding the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and a buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers overturned management plans limiting energy development on certain BLM lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Altogether, the Trump administration and its legislative allies have taken steps to reduce or eliminate protections for nearly 90 million acres of public land, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. That figure rises to more than 175 million acres if you include the habitat protections diminished by the administration’s moves to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the organization notes.

“All of these things represent in some ways the largest attack on our public lands and giveaway to large multinational mining corporations that we’ve seen probably since the 19th century,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, who likened the level of resource exploitation to “something like what happened during the robber baron era when there was no regulation or protection for our communities or the environment.”

Stansbury has introduced legislation that would increase the fees mining companies must pay to sit on speculative claims on federal lands and require those funds be used for conservation. She told me it’s just a tiny contribution to a larger effort to push back against the administration’s approach to initiate extraction on public lands, which she described as so frequent and pervasive that “it’s a bit like whack-a-mole.”

“So much damage has been done, both administratively and legislatively, over the last 11 months since Trump took office,” she said.

As for the Colosseum Mine, the DOI sided with its operators back in the spring, saying Dateline Resources did not have to seek authorization from the Park Service to keep mining. The announcement was followed by public endorsements from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The company’s stock value soared, and by September, it had kicked off a major drilling blitz.

The company has already uncovered high-grade gold deposits. It’s taking a break for Christmas, but is expected to resume drilling in the new year.

More recent land news

The Pacific Forest Trust returned nearly 900 acres of land near Yosemite National Park to the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation in a transfer partially financed by the state, reports Kurtis Alexander of the San Francisco Chronicle. Members of the Indigenous group were forced off their ancestral lands during the California Gold Rush, when state-sponsored militias undertook efforts to exterminate them. Some now hope the new property will bolster their decades-long push for federal recognition.

California State Parks is violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing offroaders to drive over dunes that are home to western snowy plovers, a judge recently ruled in a long-running legal case over the use of Oceano Dunes State Recreation Area along the Central Coast. Edvard Pettersson of the Courthouse News Service reports that State Parks will need a federal “take” permit to continue to allow offroading at the popular beachside spot.

California lawmakers introduced legislation to conserve more than 1.7 million acres of public lands across the state, in part by expanding the Los Padres National Forest and the Carrizo Plain National Monument, according to Stephanie Zappelli of the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

The federal public lands grazing program was created as a bulwark against environmental damage but has been transformed into a massive subsidy program benefiting a select few, including billionaire hobby ranchers and large corporations, according to an investigation by ProPublica and High Country News. The three-part series also found a loophole allowing for the automatic renewal of grazing permits has led to less oversight over the health of these lands.

A few last things in climate news

President Trump’s media company is merging with a nuclear fusion energy firm in a $6-billion deal that some analysts have described as a major conflict of interest, my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen reports.

House Republicans pushed through a bill that would overhaul the federal environmental review process in a way that critics say could speed up the approval process for oil and gas projects while stymieing clean energy, report Aidan Hughes and Carl David Goette-Luciak of Inside Climate News.

The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol is likely to be removed from California milk cartons, my colleague Susanne Rust reports. The decision exposes how used beverage packaging has been illegally exported to East Asia as “recycled” mixed paper, violating international environmental law.

Wind energy is again under attack from the Trump administration, which this week ordered all major wind construction projects to halt. As The Times’ Hayley Smith notes, the White House has been consistent in slowing down clean energy development in 2025, but offshore wind has been a particular bête noire for the President.

We’ve published a comprehensive collection of stories looking back on the wildfires that burned though Altadena and Pacific Palisades last January and all that’s happened since, which columnist Steve Lopez calls “one of the most apocalyptic years in Southern California history.” Check out After the Fires here.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more land news, follow @phila_lex on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour ran from 2023 to 2024 and became a record breaking sensation

Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated new documentary, The End of an Era has finally landed on Disney Plus.

The six episode series, which will see two episodes released every week, gives an intimate look on the huge phenomenon that is the Eras Tour as it made headlines and excited fans around the world.

Disney teases: “In addition, the series features Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter, Travis Kelce, Ed Sheeran, and Florence Welch, along with her band, dancers, crew, and family members – offering never-before-seen insight into what it took to create a phenomenon.”

As well as the documentary, The Final Show also debuts today (December 12) which is the full concert film from the final show in Vancouver, featuring for the first ever time the entire set of The Tortured Poets Department.

As fans delve into the latest instalments of the brand new documentary, we have taken a look at some of the things that made the Eras Tour so huge.

Over 100 shows and 400 hours performed

The Eras tour ran from 2023 to 2024 meaning that Taylor and her crew performed a record breaking 149 shows.

Originally, the Eras Tour was announced back in 2022 with significantly less dates, but with such high demand, she added more to the diary and it quickly became a huge phenomenon.

The tour first kicked off in Arizona in March 2023 and came to an end in December 2024. In total, it is said the star spent over 480 hours on stage, which is the equivalent to just under three weeks.

As each show varied in length and was dependant on an array of things like the weather, each night was around three hours, making it a huge ambition that was successfully carried out.

According to reports, with 44 songs on her setlist, eventually increasing to 46 after her new album was released in 2024, Taylor also performed songs not on her setlist as part of a special acoustic performance.

The Eras Tour 100th show

Taylor’s 100th show was actually performed here in the UK, in Liverpool. Taking to Instagram, the star said: “So many dreamy memories from Liverpool!! We played our 100th show on The Eras Tour (which feels truly deranged to say because this show feels new to me every time we play it).”

She continued to thank everyone involved, adding the crowds were “expressive, generous and endlessly fun.”

What made the Eras Tour so popular?

The Eras Tour was a huge moment in Taylor’s career, celebrating all of the music through the decades, every era. Taylor took her music everywhere across the world, visiting over 20 countries.

It was a record breaking tour, bringing in over $2billion in sales making it the highest earning concert run. Taylor Swift Touring also confirmed over 10 billion people attended during the course of the tour.

And when it came to breaking records, reports suggest another record was broken when Ticketmaster sold the most tickets sold by an artist in a single day – many Swifties can remember the painstaking wait they endured for tickets.

There are many reasons the tour became a huge phenomenon, being timed post pandemic, but the main reason being it brought together fans of all ages, celebrating her entire career, being described as a huge cultural event.

Earthquake?

You may have seen reports at the time that Taylor Swift concerts generated seismic activity. In 2023 in Seattle, a seismologist said activity was recorded equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.

Also in Edinburgh in 2024, reports suggest earthquake readings were again detected.

Friendship bracelets

Taylor Swift friendship bracelets are colourful, beaded bracelets that were made by fans for the Eras Tour, often traded in. Inspired by the song You’re On Your Own Kid, some fans ended up wearing dozens on their wrists, even hoping to give them to Taylor and her mum.

Food bank donations

While on tour, Taylor Swift donated to local food banks and charities when she visited a place.

According to ITV, the singer made a “generous donation” to around 1,400 food banks and community organisations in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff, and London.

Taylor Swift’s the End of an Era documentary is now available to stream on Disney Plus.