state official

Erin Wagner lives in the Chicago suburbs but visits two bald eagles in Southern California’s Big Bear Valley nearly every day.

At work, the 41-year-old often plays a livestream featuring Jackie and Shadow on one of her monitors — a respite when she needs a break.

The avian power couple follows her home, keeping her company as she cooks dinner.

“We live in such a busy world, and things are always being thrown at our face, so sometimes it’s nice to just have a gentle reminder of nature and what else is out there in the world,” Wagner told me last week.

She is just one of many devoted fans; the eagles had the highest view count of any year-round nature livestream active on YouTube between last fall and this spring, said Rebecca Mauldin, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who studies social connectedness.

While the eagles’ following is singular, it’s part of a broader trend: surging interest in webcams that broadcast nature, unadulterated, minute by minute, in all its messy glory.

The number of 24/7 livestreams created per year swelled by about 3,000% between 2019 and 2025, Mauldin’s data show.

Jackie and Shadow’s livestream exemplifies “Slow TV,” a genre that began with a 2009 Norwegian broadcast of a seven-hour train trip. It took off, with other marathon programs featuring chopping firewood and knitting.

Nature looms large in the format. Millions tune into Sweden’s live coverage of an annual moose migration, and the same goes for a seasonal broadcast of bears chowing down on salmon in Alaska.

The appeal makes intuitive sense. In a world of quick camera cuts, sound bites and troubling headlines, Mother Nature’s rhythms can be a salve. And with many of us wound up in concrete urbanity, the livestreams offer instant transportation to the wild.

Following Jackie and Shadow takes patience. If they’re not hanging out at the nest, it’s a waiting game until they come back. Even when they’re there, there may not be much going on.

Entertainment “can be very artificial, it can be very packaged, and it can be very short,” said Jenny Voisard, media manager for Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that operates the cameras broadcasting the eagles. “This is long and slow and calm.”

Yet nature is unpredictable, another draw for viewers. This nesting season alone has brought plenty of drama, from the lovebirds losing their eggs to ravens to laying more not long after. Last week, I wrote about the couple’s shocking origin — it involves a love triangle! — and their rise to reality stardom.

Last year, Jackie and Shadow raised two chicks that went on to fledge: Sunny and Gizmo

(Friends of Big Bear Valley)

Research backs the vibes. Those who watch nature livestreams — from platypi to osprey — report a host of benefits, from uplifted mood to relaxation, said Mauldin, citing a literature review she-coauthored.

Others get jazzed about learning about a particular species, she said.

There may be limitations, though.

In terms of connecting to nature, “I lean toward the effect is stronger if you’re actually outdoors, or, you know, you’ve got a little ant crawling on your finger and watching it,” Mauldin said.

She highlighted another dimension I didn’t think of: Many “talk about how they’re developing strong online relationships, and you can see it in the chats or in the comments.”

Someone might comment that they had a bad day and are glad to be watching their favorite birds again, and another viewer will rally to support them. Then there are people who watch on their own, but gab about it later with a friend.

Friends of Big Bear Valley, with 1.2 million followers on Facebook, offers more than just updates on the eagles. It’s a buzzing community center where fans can share their thoughts and engage with one another.

Animals may also get something out of being watched: protection.

The eagle cam, for example, “sort of stokes the public’s imagination and interest in conservation,” said Thomas Leeman, deputy chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s migratory bird program in the Pacific Southwest. “They start to really care about whichever particular birds that they’re watching.”

Wagner, of Chicago, said her husband and 14-year-old son sometimes give her a hard time about how invested she is in Jackie and Shadow.

But her cat, Oscar, shares her fascination.

She recently posted a photo of the feline on Jackie and Shadow’s Facebook — looking intently at a TV where an eagle hunkered down on the nest.

“My new cat is just as obsessed as all of us,” she wrote.

More recent wildlife news

Big Bear’s celeb eagles continue to keep us on our toes. Jackie recently vanished from the nest for nearly 24 hours, sending fans into a panic — but eventually reunited with her eggs and mate, reports USA Today’s Michelle Del Rey.

While we’re on the subject of avian kind: Last week, I wrote about a pair of condors that appear to be nesting in Northern California, something not seen for a century. The Yurok Tribe is leading the effort to bring the large, endangered vultures back to their historic homeland in Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

As conservationists celebrate that win, the story for birds nationwide is not so rosy. A recent study found that North America is rapidly losing birds, and the loss is accelerating, largely due to intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, writes the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein.

A few last things in climate news

Trump’s war on Iran has disrupted global oil and gas supplies. The conflict has kept ships that carry millions of barrels of oil a day stranded in the Persian Gulf, and key Middle East facilities have sustained damage, reports the Associated Press.

Oil prices have spiked, and Californians are paying the highest price at the pump in the nation. As my colleague Iris Kwok explains, that’s due to the state’s higher taxes and stricter requirements for cleaner, more expensive gas that pollutes.

Sticker shock at gas stations is expected to spur more Americans to consider hybrid or electric vehicles, according to fellow Times staffers Caroline Petrow-Cohen and Blanca Begert.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has released a legal opinion that sets the stage to approve a controversial oil operation off the Santa Barbara County coast, The Times’ Grace Toohey reports.

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 wildlife and outdoors news, follow Lila Seidman at @lilaseidman.bsky.social on Bluesky and @lila_seidman on X.

When a Los Angeles County judge ordered a notorious Watts scrap metal yard to permanently halt its operations last year, many residents and environmental advocates thought it might finally bring an end to the facility’s dangerous pollution. Instead, the shutdown may have only marked the beginning of what could be a lengthy process to erase decades of environmental degradation.

For nearly 75 years, S&W Atlas Iron & Metal had crushed car parts, shredded aluminum cans and processed an assortment of recyclable metals. Over that time, the facility and its owners racked up dozens of environmental violations and were eventually criminally convicted of crimes that endangered students next door at Jordan High School and residents of Watts.

Since Atlas’ court-ordered closure, the towering piles of scrap metal have largely disappeared from the 3-acre recycling facility. Jordan High’s campus hasn’t been rocked by explosions, pelted with shrapnel or blanketed in layers of toxic, metallic dust.

But one of the most serious, and remaining, threats has gone unnoticed until recently.

A contractor hired by Atlas recently measured a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals percolating in the soil and groundwater beneath the site at orders of magnitude above California’s standards, according to court documents. Around five feet underground, a soil probe detected the highest reading of vinyl chloride — just one of the several carcinogens at the site — more than 1.3 million times higher than the state benchmark.

“What they found were astronomical levels of these contaminants,” said Danielle Hoague, director of research for the Better Watts Initiative.

“I think it’s definitely a hidden danger. I don’t think that the community has been informed of what underlies Atlas. But I would assume that people are experiencing the health effects of this.”

State regulators are still hashing out the scope of the cleanup at the shuttered industrial site. But, more concerning, Watts residents and school district officials fear these contaminants may be migrating with groundwater, posing a risk to neighboring Jordan High School and Jordan Downs housing complex. If that is the case, the question is who will foot the bill to clean up this pollution?

“The cleanup of the Atlas site has been slow, and Atlas is proceeding with a lack of executed urgency,” an L.A. Unified School District spokesperson said in a statement.

Atlas “has failed to advise Los Angeles Unified promptly of contamination found just feet away from the school campus and the adjacent Jordan Downs Housing Development,” the spokesperson added.

Shutting down a source of pollution is only the first step in campaigns for cleaner air. It’s often equally burdensome, time-consuming and expensive to hold polluters accountable for cleaning up the legacy contamination at their own property. And it’s even more difficult to compel companies to decontaminate nearby properties that may have been affected by their operations.

In Lincoln Heights, decades passed after the closure of a massive dry-cleaning operation before residents learned of underground contamination spreading off-site, potentially threatening nearby homes and an elementary school. In Newport Beach, a sprawling aerospace and defense hub was converted into luxury homes three decades ago, and homeowners were only recently informed about residual toxic pollution. In Jurupa Valley, residents were alarmed to learn about toxic vapors seeping into their homes after contaminated groundwater migrated several miles from a former hazardous waste dump uphill.

In Watts, many residents were already aware of the danger posed by toxic metals produced by Atlas’ operations. At times, metallic dust left parts of Jordan High’s campus covered in an iridescent sheen, and the school district has in the past removed contaminated soil from the campus.

But it was far more difficult to predict that pollution could be spreading underground. Many of the chemicals found beneath Atlas evaporate at room temperature and sneak into buildings through cracks in foundations, floor drains or other gaps — a process known as vapor intrusion.

Over the past year, an LAUSD consultant conducted two rounds of air sampling at Jordan High. The levels of airborne chemicals the detected in gym’s basement suggest toxic vapors are infiltrating the building. However, the consultant has said more air sampling is necessary to determine whether it constitutes an unacceptable health risk.

So far, the district says the concentrations have not warranted closing school buildings yet.

In the meantime, the school district is pleading with the state regulators to get Atlas to commit to cleaning up the toxic fallout.

A Los Angeles County judge recently ordered an audit of Atlas’ finances, raising doubts about the company’s ability to pay potential damages.

But community leaders, like Timothy Watkins, president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, won’t be satisfied until the case moves from courtroom to cleanup.

“There’s no champion for us. So we have to find a way — with very, very limited resources — to get our story out in a way that begins to raise some kind of alarm and awareness of the danger here.”

More recent air news

New research suggests some air pollutants can significantly alter insect behavior, science journalist Gennaro Tomma writes in National Geographic. Smog-forming emissions can interfere with insect communication by breaking down pheromones, causing ant colonies to exhibit aggression toward their own members and neglect their larvae.

The Trump administration reversed a Biden-era rule limiting brain-damaging mercury emissions from coal plants, arguing compliance costs threatened energy reliability, Guardian environmental reporter Oliver Milman writes. The rollback allows some of the coal plants to avoid expensive upgrades, sparking debate over the trade-off between economic concerns and public health risks.

The California Air Resources Board set an Aug. 10 deadline for some of the nation’s largest companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Sacramento Bee’s climate reporter Chaewon Chung. A pair of state laws enacted in 2023 required companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to adhere to the reporting requirements.

In other climate news

As Western states brace for deep cuts to their allotments of Colorado River water, one California water agency may be in a position to help. San Diego County Water Authority’s board recently voted to consider selling a portion of its water to Arizona and Nevada, reports Ian James for the LA. Times. The San Diego area is home to the nation’s largest desalination plant, allowing the agency to rely less on unpredictable reservoirs.

The escalating war in the Middle East has triggered the biggest oil and gas market disruption since 2022, driving a surge in energy prices and forcing a re-evaluation of energy security, Bloomberg reports. While high prices could bolster the case for deploying renewable energy, experts warn that worsening inflation — from higher energy costs — could ironically hamper the shift to clean energy.

A Southern California architect is challenging the notion that wildfire-resistant designs can’t also be visually stunning. L.A. Times wildfire reporter Noah Haggerty interviewed a Palisades fire survivor who is so confident about the design of his newly constructed Spanish-revival home, he asked the fire department if he could spark a controlled fire on his property.

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 air quality news, follow Tony Briscoe on X and LinkedIn.

The latest news about the Colorado River is dire. Since 2000, the river’s flow has shrunk about 20%. An extremely warm winter has brought very little snow in the Rocky Mountains. Reservoirs are declining to critically low levels. And the leaders of seven states are still at loggerheads over the water cutbacks each should accept to prevent reservoirs from falling further.

Here are six things to know about the current crisis:

A short-term deal, at best: Negotiators for the seven states still are discussing ways they might reach a short-term deal as a “bridge into a longer-term agreement,” said Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary. But after missing a Feb. 14 federal deadline, the states are running out of time. Gov. Gavin Newsom told governors in a letter that California would welcome joint investments in water recycling and desalination, and that he believes it’s still possible to agree on a plan “for the next several years.”

States drawing up Plan B: Officials are talking about what they will do if no deal is reached. Representatives of Arizona, Nevada and California already offered cuts of 27%, 17% and 10%, respectively. But that hasn’t been enough for negotiators representing Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah. Crowfoot said the talks about a Plan B among California, Arizona and Nevada officials focus on what water agencies could do to stabilize the level of Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, which is 34% full and set to decline further.

A court battle looms: As the Trump administration considers ordering cuts, state officials are bracing for potential lawsuits. Utah and Arizona have begun setting aside money for legal bills. A fight could take years until there is a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona emeritus law professor, said no one knows what the court would do. “This is rolling the dice on something that is really quite profound,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to go to Vegas and play the craps.”

Arizona is most vulnerable: Arizona is preparing for the largest cutbacks. That’s because the Central Arizona Project, the series of canals that runs to the Phoenix and Tucson areas, isn’t nearly as old as other aqueducts, giving it low-priority water rights that put it among the first in line for cuts. Farmers who rely on the CAP already have been forced to leave many fields dry. The coming cuts likely will prompt Arizona cities to drill more wells and pump more groundwater, which is declining in many areas.

Less for farms: Nearly half the water that is taken from the river is used to grow hay for cattle. In all, agriculture consumes about three-fourths of the water. In the last few years, farmers have left some hay fields dry part of the year in exchange for federal funds. Glennon said agriculture needs to conserve more, and an agreement among the states could include a fund to help farmers switch to irrigation systems that use less.

Cutbacks carry costs: For cities, adapting will require more conservation and searching for alternative water sources, which will cost money and push up water bills, said Rhett Larson, an Arizona State University law professor. Some cities probably also will have to buy out farmers or pay them to leave fields fallow, which will push up urban water costs further, he said. And as farms produce less, he said, “eventually you’ll feel it in the grocery store.”

More water news

With very little snow in the Rocky Mountains, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation now projects the runoff flowing into Lake Powell, the Colorado River’s second-largest reservoir, will decrease so much that by later this year the water level probably will drop too low to spin turbines and generate hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. As Shannon Mullane reports for the Colorado Sun, that would remove a cheap, renewable and reliable power source for communities across the West.

Glen Canyon Dam also has design flaws that create problems at low reservoir levels. As I’ve reported, if the reservoir declines to a point that water can pass through only four 8-foot-wide bypass tubes, that would limit how much can reach California, Arizona and Nevada. Those states have urged the Trump administration to fix or overhaul the dam to address this problem.

Last week, Jonathan P. Thompson wrote in his newsletter The Land Desk that the impasse among the states is pushing Glen Canyon Dam closer to the brink. He said federal officials could decide to reengineer the dam to ensure water still can pass at low reservoir levels, but that would be only a temporary fix. As Thompson put it, “aridification is rendering the dam obsolete, at least as a water storage savings account.”

Heather Sackett of Aspen Journalism spoke with experts about why the worsening crisis still hasn’t forced a deal. Kathryn Sorensen, a researcher at the ASU Kyl Center for Water Policy, said: “There’s so little water to go around that positions have become hardened as a result. We’re not just talking about inconvenient cuts; we’re talking about severe pain to economies at this point.”

In Arizona, an advocacy group backed by the Central Arizona Project has begun rolling out TV ads and online videos saying the state is being singled out in the options the federal government has outlined. Brandon Loomis of the Arizona Republic reports that an ad aired by the coalition declares: “Arizona is being unfairly targeted for reductions of Colorado River water that would cripple our state.”

In California, Newsom launched a new plan this week that sets a goal of securing 9 million acre-feet of additional water, enough to fill two Shasta Reservoirs, by 2040 in an effort to offset expected losses caused by climate change. As Camille von Kaenel reports for E&E News by Politico, the 2028 water plan will be a blueprint for new reservoirs, conservation efforts and groundwater recharge projects. Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth says the effort “will help us plan smarter to deal with the way climate change is testing our water systems.”

More climate and environment news

California is spearheading a lawsuit against the Trump administration for canceling billions of dollars in funding for clean energy projects awarded during the Biden administration. My colleague Hayley Smith reported the cuts included a $1.2-billion federal grant for California’s hydrogen hub. The hub was part of the Biden administration’s nationwide effort to develop hydrogen projects to replace planet-warming fossil fuels, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as heavy-duty trucking.

Illegal cannabis farms are polluting national forests in California, leaving contamination that harms wildlife and watersheds. Reporter Rachel Becker of CalMatters visited an illicit cannabis grow that was raided by law enforcement in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, where a pile of pesticide sprayers was left behind. Researchers are sounding the alarm, she wrote, “that inadequate federal funding, disjointed communication, dangerous conditions and agencies stretched thin at both the state and federal level are leaving thousands of grow sites — and their trash, pesticides, fertilizers and more — to foul California’s forests.”

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 water and climate news, follow Ian James @ianjames.bsky.social on Bluesky and @ByIanJames on X.

There are two, seemingly irreconcilable, stories of how the Palisades fire became a deadly and destructive behemoth dominating post-fire discourse. One is told by the residents who lived through it, and the other by the government officials who responded to it.

Government officials have routinely argued they had little agency to change the outcome of a colossal fire fanned by intense winds. Palisadians point to a string of government missteps they say clearly led to and exacerbated the disaster.

Officials’ unwillingness to acknowledge any mistakes has only sharpened residents’ focus on them, functionally bringing to a grinding halt any discourse around how the two groups can work to prevent the next disaster.

Instead, residents have been left feeling gaslighted by their own government, while fire officials struggle to navigate the backlash to new fire safety measures.

When officials and residents do talk solutions, the former tend to emphasize personal responsibility — most prominently, Zone Zero, which will require residents to remove flammable materials and plants near their homes — while the latter often push for greater government responsibility: a bolstered fire service and a beefed-up water system.

The residents’ account goes like this:

The Fire Department failed to put out the Lachman fire a week prior. Mayor Karen Bass then left the country during dangerous weather while the deputy mayor for public safety position was vacant after Brian K. Williams, who formerly held the role, was put on leave after allegedly making a bomb threat against City Hall. L.A.’s city Fire Department officials failed to deploy 1,000 firefighters in advance of the fire and did not call for firefighters to work extended hours, while dozens of fire engines were out of commission at the time, waiting for repairs.

An aircraft drops fire retardant on the Palisades fire on Jan. 8, 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Meanwhile the L.A. Department of Water and Power left a water reservoir designed for firefighting empty and the city failed to analyze how it would evacuate the community.

However, when government officials — be it the mayor, the fire chief or the governor — describe the fire, they tell a different story:

The day after the fire erupted, Bass placed some of the blame on climate change, which some scientists argue has exacerbated fires in the area by increasing the frequency and intensity of hot, dry and windy conditions. Fire officials stressed that the winds during the first few days of the fires were so strong that there was little even the best-equipped fire service could do and that the fire grew so large that there wasn’t a single fire hydrant system in the world that could handle the demand.

Many residents don’t deny that, under such extreme conditions and after the fire reached a certain scale and ferocity, the destruction became inevitable — and there are many who would just like to move on from January 2025.

However, others remain frustrated that these official versions of the story do not acknowledge the government’s failure to prepare for such conditions and its failure to stop the fire before it passed the threshold of inevitability. Indeed, at times, officials have shied away from these uncomfortable discussions to shield themselves from potential liability.

One telling example: On the one-year anniversary of the fire, residents gathered to voice these frustrations at a protest in the heart of the neighborhood. But when Bass was asked to comment on the event, she dismissed it as an unfit way to commemorate the anniversary and accused organizers of profiting off the disaster.

Survivors gathered in Palisades Village to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Palisades fire on Jan. 7, 2026.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

This sort of dismissal has essentially forestalled any constructive discussions of climate change, the limits of the fire service and water systems and proposals like Zone Zero, since so many Palisadians now feel like any of that is just a fig leaf for the government’s agency and responsibility, and not a good faith discussion of how to solve the wildfire problem.

The reality is, how climate change is influencing wildfires in Southern California is still a subject of debate among scientists. That doesn’t mean that local leaders need to sit on their hands and wait for consensus. Experts can easily point to a litany of steps that can be taken to better protect residents, regardless of how profound the impact is of global warming on fire risk in the region.

Fire scientists and fire service veterans (who have the pleasure of speaking freely in retirement) argue both personal responsibility and government responsibility play key roles in preventing disasters:

Home hardening and defensible space slow down the dangerous chain reaction in which a wildfire jumps into an urban area and spreads from house to house. It is then the responsibility of a prepared and capable fire service to use that extra time to stop the destruction in its tracks.

The bottom line is that neither the government’s story nor the residents’ story of the Palisades fire is fundamentally wrong. And neither is fully complete.

The conversations around fire preparedness that need to happen next will require both homeowners and government officials to acknowledge they both have real agency and responsibility to shape the outcome of the next fire.

More recent wildfire news

Mayor Karen Bass personally directed the watering down of the city Fire Department’s after-action report on the Palisades fire in an attempt to limit the city’s legal liability, my colleague Alene Tchekmedyian reports. The revelations come after Bass repeatedly denied any involvement in the editing of the report to downplay failures.

Last Thursday, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced his office had opened a civil rights investigation into the fire preparations and response for the Eaton fire, looking for any potential disparities in the historically Black west Altadena, my colleague Grace Toohey reports. West Altadena received late evacuation alerts, and officials allocated limited firefighting resources to the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the federal government is hard at work attempting to unify federal firefighting resources within the Department of the Interior — including from the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service — into one U.S. Wildland Fire Service by the end of the year. The effort does not yet include the federal government’s largest firefighting team in the U.S. Forest Service. Because it is housed under the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of the Interior, merging it into the U.S. Wildland Fire Service would probably require congressional approval.

A few last things in climate news

An investigation from my colleague Hayley Smith found that, as Southern California’s top air pollution authority weighed a proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances, it was inundated with at least 20,000 AI-generated emails opposing the measure. When staff reached out to a subset of people listed as submitters of the comments, only five responded, with three saying they had no knowledge of the letters. The authority ultimately scrapped the proposal.

The National Science Foundation announced last week that a supercomputer in Wyoming used by thousands of scientists to simulate and research the climate would be transferred from a federally funded research institute to an unnamed “third-party operator.” It left scientists shocked and concerned.

The Department of Energy has made new nuclear energy a priority; however, no new commercial-scale nuclear facilities are currently under construction, and it’s unclear how the U.S., which imports most of the uranium used by its current reactors, would fuel any new nuclear power plants. These sorts of technical challenges have vexed nuclear advocates who are fighting against a decades-long stagnation in nuclear development, triggered primarily by safety concerns.

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 wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social on Bluesky.