Trish @ptrodd

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

🚨 ALERT! TANJUNG PUTING, KALIMANTAN TENGAH, DALAM BAHAYA! WATER BOMBING URGENTLY NEEDED! 🔥 Surat Terbuka untuk Pemerintah Api terus menjalar, hutan terbakar. Orangutan kehilangan rumah, bekantan terancam punah. Owa dan beruang madu ikut menderita, satwa tak bersalah kehilangan habitatnya. Relawan berjibaku, bertaruh nyawa. JANGAN TUNGGU HUTAN JADI ABU, BARU SEMUA BICARA! Percepat bantuan, kerahkan water bombing segera! VIRALKAN! BANTU UP KAWAN! SELAMATKAN TAMAN NASIONAL TANJUNG PUTING SEBELUM TERLAMBAT! 🌳🦧🔥 Vid griyasafitri29 10 Oktober 2026

We are alive for < 0.00002% of the time life has existed on Earth and we know and see so little of the life that is present with us. I try to show you some of the life that few people will ever see. The marine plankton are the most important creatures on the planet and some of the most exquisitely, beautiful too. @zeiss_micro @natgeo

#BREAKING: The Metals Company applied to start the world’s first-ever commercial deep-sea mining operation. The targeted region in the eastern Pacific is home to thousands of species, including some discovered this year. Stop this before it can begin: oceana.ly/3VtEhpu

Before... and after. Interceptor 006 has been operational in the Rio Las Vacas, Guatemala, since June 2023. In this catch alone, over 210,000 kg of trash were stopped from reaching the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea.

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Today is the 16th anniversary of the White Knuckles music video. We worked with 12 wonderful trainers, who taught the choreography to 14 rescue dogs over the course of 3 months. We had to learn the dance, too. As it turns out, you really can teach old dogs new tricks.

In April 2009, dozens of cedar waxwings were found dead in a single yard in Thomas County, Georgia. Their stomachs were packed with one thing: small, red berries. The birds had hemorrhaged into their lungs, tracheas, hearts and brains. It was cyanide poisoning. A decade later the curator of the UNC Chapel Hill Herbarium found dead waxwings on campus, in sight of a large nandina planting. That's what finally prompted somebody to test the berries. Nandina, sold as heavenly bamboo, is from China and Japan, it's invasive across the Southeast, and it's still sold at garden centers. Most birds can detoxify small amounts of cyanide. Eat one or two nandina berries and you'll be sick for a day. Cedar waxwings don't eat one or two. They gorge on them. A flock strips a bush in minutes. And the ripe berries release cyanide slowly as they digest. There's no warning, no bad taste, nothing that says stop. By the time it's hitting, the bird has a crop full of them. Worse, nandina berries hang on all winter, when almost nothing else is fruiting. It's most attractive exactly when the birds have the fewest options. If you have one, cut the berry clusters off before they ripen. That solves the problem this year. Then dig it out. Get under the root crown and pry it up, or it comes back. Alternatively, a cut stump with a dab of herbicide will usually kill it for good. Replace it with winterberry holly, American holly, or eastern red cedar. Red berries all winter, and waxwings are supposed to eat those.

World champion freediver Alessia Zecchini dived into the Mediterranean Sea to stand in solidarity with Palestinian children, marking the start of the Global Gaza Kite Weekend, which begins on Saturday

@NiallHarbison Donate. Donate. Donate. We can all see Tina’s Hospital. Beautiful! 🧡 #rescueismyfavouritebreed

Live stream of our run of 120km to build a hospital for street dogs. We are 90km in absolute bits but we can maybe make it… youtube.com/live/K44RPa-wg…

Time to say goodbye: This is a Cerulean paradise flycatcher, one of the rarest birds in the world. For more than a century it was believed to be extinct—known only from a single specimen collected in 1873—until one was found in the last fragments of its ruined forest in the 1990s. The few found since live only on the island of Sangihe, Indonesia, where the Baru Gold Corp has finally obtained permission to mine the island. On September 8, 2026, the CEO, Terry Filbert, issued this statement: "Baru’s team of mining and finance professionals boasts extensive experience in starting and operating gold and coal assets. Baru is positioned to become Indonesia’s next gold producer." The locals have fought this for years, fearing for their settlements and water supplies, but they and this beautiful and unique little bird don't matter to the Indonesian government as it continues its large-scale environmental destruction.

Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon says the AI industry is "gambling with our lives." He tells Anderson what he finds "most scary is if AI is used to make itself more intelligent" and warns these companies are "compelled to race toward building a deadly technology."

PROTECT RAINFOREST!!!!!!!!!!!! 🌳 It’s just insane how Indonesia holds more endemic species than anywhere else on earth yet the corporate world is happy for them to destroy it for cheap cash. How do we put ‘value’ on intact biodiverse rainforests in this profit-driven world???

ᶜⁱᶜᵃᵍ ᵈⁱ ᴰⁱⁿᵈⁱⁿᵍ @creeping5ilence

2 months ago

Kanguru wondiwoi (Dendrolagus mayri), hewan endemik langka Papua yang terakhir terlihat tahun 1928 yg pertama kali didokumentasikan lewat spesimen oleh ahli biologi asal Inggris, Ernst Mayr. Kini ditemukan kembali di hutan pegunungan Papua Barat setelah 90 tahun dianggap punah.

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Such majestic animals and only just over 300 left Today Trump signed an order where they can be shot on sight A move that will ensure their extinction forever Such an evil act

Mary @Minerva2603

2 months ago

La vida de este lobo vale un millón de veces más que @SecRollins Los lobos mexicanos NO representan una amenaza real para la industria ganadera. Solo 0.5% de las pérdidas de ganado son causadas por carnívoros nativos; hechos, no mitos! #MexicanWolf

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110 MILLION year old RAINFOREST turned into absolutely nothing. 😭 Tens of thousands of species to none. The destruction humans have caused in Indonesia is the most depressing thing ever. 🌳🔥

Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski

2 months ago

En la isla de Bormeo, en Indonesia, una madre orangután y su pequeño hijo deambulan por tierra arrasada buscando algo de comer, después de que su hábitat natural haya sido destruido para plantar aceite de palma. Esta imagen apocalíptica define a donde nos lleva el capitalismo,

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South Africa has approved new export quotas for elephant, black rhino & leopard hunting trophies. Born Free is deeply disappointed by this decision, which disregards calls for stronger protections for some of Africa's most iconic species. Read more 👉 bit.ly/4zUxt3U

@carlosromeroco Protect these beautiful wild souls #Noalacaza #banhunting

Releasing balloons might look pretty for a few seconds, but the reality is devastating. Ask any farmer, livestock owner, or coastal warden—we are endlessly picking these out of fields, hedgerows, and the sea. #BanBalloonReleases #ProtectWildlife

Yes it may be better than nothing sometimes. But lets do better.

This NASA visualization shows the CO2 emitted into the earth's atmosphere + clarifies who is responsible for the climate crisis: we, the Global North. There is not time to wait. #ActOnClimate #climate #energy #renewables