Click the link access the report on the New Phytologist website (Henri M. Braunmiller, Michael Bitterlich, Nicolai Koebernick, Eva Jacob, Anna S. Heck, Andrea Schnepf, Johanna Pausch, Jussi-Petteri Suuronen, Bernhard Hesse, Sylvain Delzon, Jonathan Perrin, Andrew King, Jan Jansa, Mutez A. Ahmed). Here’s the summary:

Summary

• Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) contribute to plant nutrient and water uptake via their extraradical hyphal networks. However, in situ methodologies to quantify architectural and morphological traits of these networks in soil are largely lacking, limiting our understanding of AMF-mediated resource transport.
• Using synchrotron-based X-ray computed microtomography (micro-CT), we established a workflow to cultivate, noninvasively image, and quantitatively analyze AMF hyphosphere and rhizosphere structures in the interaggregate space across two soil textures and biological contexts.
• We developed a pipeline for quantitative three-dimensional (3D) assessment of key architectural and morphological traits including structure counts, hyphal length, branching frequency, volume, and surface area. Our method further permits (1) measurement of AMF–soil and AMF–root interface areas and (2) microscale quantification of pore space occupancy by AMF.
• Micro-CT offers a tool for noninvasively visualizing AMF in air-filled soil pore space. We outline how such quantitative 3D information can be incorporated into image-based and functional-structural soil–plant models, thereby supporting a better mechanistic understanding of AMF-mediated processes in soils and plants

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) may enhance host plant access to soil nutrients and hence contribute to global food security and nutrition (Antunes et al., 2012; Rodriguez & Sanders, 2015; Thirkell et al., 2020). These fungi can supply noticeable proportions of essential plant nutrients, including phosphorus, nitrogen, zinc, and copper (Marschner & Dell, 1994). In addition, numerous studies showed that AMF improve plant water uptake, particularly under dry soil conditions (e.g. Bitterlich et al., 2018; Kakouridis et al., 2022; Abdalla et al., 2023), suggesting a potentially increasing contribution to plant performance under future climate scenarios. A proposed mechanism for AMF-mediated enhancement of water and nutrient acquisition involves the formation of extensive extraradical hyphal networks (Kokkoris, 2026). These networks increase the absorptive surface area and enlarge the effective root radius (Abdalla & Ahmed, 2021), growing beyond depletion zones and thus facilitating access to yet undepleted soil (Schnepf et al., 2008). The degree to which AMF improve plant water and nutrient uptake likely depends on the architecture and morphology of their hyphal network, including hyphal length, diameter, and connectivity among individual hyphae, roots, and soil particles (Abdalla & Ahmed, 2021; Kakouridis et al., 2022). Thus, for a better mechanistic understanding of the role of AMF on water and nutrient transport, characterization of hyphal network structure in soil is indispensable.

Click the link to read Fungi Are Holding the Food Web Together. New Research Images This Underground Network on the EOS website (Emily Gardner). Here’s an excerpt:

September 29, 2026

More than 80% of plants on Earth partner with mycorrhizal fungi to extract nutrients from soil. Underground, in a zone of soil known as the rhizosphere, these fungi grow into vast networks of tubular cells called mycelium (individual cells are called hyphae). These tiny hyphae—about one tenth to one hundredth the width of a human hair—can gather nutrients in the soil and send them into plants. If plants don’t get enough nutrients, neither do the animals that depend on them or the animals that depend on those animals. Furthermore, some research has suggested that mycorrhizal fungi absorb the equivalent of 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. All of this makes the rhizosphere essential to the health of our planet and its inhabitants.

“Basically everyone on Earth is dependent on this really, really tiny zone around roots, in a way,” said Henri Braunmiller, a soil ecologist and graduate student at the Technical University of Munich.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Hannah Covington):

September 24, 2026

At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where indoor temperatures hover around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius), atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth like the rings of a tree. These frozen rings — clear or cloudy, thick or thin — indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: A clear layer signals the water froze slowly, while a cloudy layer means it happened quickly, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala then analyzes the crystalline structures, particles and isotopes preserved in these layers. “All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.

Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of a historic effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from the stones that careen to Earth, battering roofs, pummeling crops and pockmarking cars.

From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety — more than double the losses seen just a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60 to 80% of the damage.

In Colorado, one of the country’s most hail-prone states, hail — not wildfire — is the main factor driving up insurance premiums. And researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.

“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.

EVEN BASIC QUESTIONS about hail have been notoriously hard to study. But a long-awaited resurgence in research, including the first major U.S. field campaign to study hail in more than 40 years, could help change that. 

ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise and help communities better prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before deep cuts hit the foundation in 2025. 

For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, using radar trucks to track storms and drones to take aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a tool called a disdrometer, recorded hail’s distribution and size based on its imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels and crushed it to test its strength. 

Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also used balloons to release golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Once aloft, each hail-like probe collected data on how fast it was traveling and whether ice was growing on it; a microphone even recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.

“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group. 

ICECHIP’S SAMPLES were packed into 26 cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR. This internationally renowned hub for weather and climate research has been used to study hail for decades. In one of its last major campaigns, in the 1970s, the U.S. investigated Soviet claims that it could suppress hail. 

Researchers say there’s no other U.S. lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.

Now NCAR’s own future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration said it would dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging that it’s targeting NCAR to punish Colorado for retaining its mail-in voting system and because Gov. Jared Polis initially refused to release former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier imprisoned for breaching election security and undermining election integrity.

In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until Sept. 30 to respond to the lawsuit.

“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”

PREVIOUS RESEARCH HAS PREDICTED climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, keeping hailstones airborne longer and allowing them to grow bigger, enabling the most damaging hail to become more common. 

A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.

Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a rapidly growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”

Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown explosively in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This is happening across the Western U.S., as previously rural or open areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.

“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.

IN 2019, FORT COLLINS became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to all the shingles and roofing materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.

It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron said fewer permits were being issued for roof replacements and fewer shingles were going to the dump. However, Fort Collins also hasn’t experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one that hit in 2018.

 A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.

ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how they can improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.

“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”   

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the October 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Hail Alley meets climate change.”

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 1, 2026

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

Wow. Just wow. Huge flash floods in the Grand Canyon this past weekend, with the biggest damage along Bright Angel Creek and Phantom Ranch. Bridges were washed away, dozens of people were evacuated, the Trans Canyon Waterline was destroyed (forcing the closure of rim hotels), and there was so much debris in the river that National Park Service officials had to shut down the river to rafting — though it is now reopened. As of Tuesday morning, two fatalities had been confirmed and one person were still missing.

The storm cells plowed across the Colorado Plateau during the waning days of August, and of meteorological summer, dumping large volumes of rain in short periods of time, leading to hot-chocolate-hued waterfalls cascading off of cliffs and down canyons. In some cases, wildfire burn scars from last year or earlier this summer exacerbated the impacts. In the Grand Canyon it’s likely that the Dragon Bravo Fire scar contributed to the severity of the flooding.

The storms tended to be isolated, pounding one area, while leaving others just miles away virtually dry, as can be seen in wildly varying streamflows.

• Video from the Grand Canyon shows that the storm and its impacts were widespread, but certainly the most significant flooding was on Bright Angel Creek, which joins the river at Phantom Ranch. The normally clear and burbling brook was flowing at about 14 cubic feet per second at 11:20 on the morning of August 29; at 12:50 p.m. the gage showed a flow of 347 cfs; then the readings vanished as the gage was overwhelmed by a torrent, disabling the gage. Witness accounts and videos show a wall of water that sounded like a freight train slamming into the Phantom Ranch area.

• Always wanted to float one of those classic, usually un-runnable desert rivers but could never get big enough flows? Now’s the time to hit at least one of them, if you dare. The San Rafael River’s USGS gage near Green River was reading 800 cfs as of early Tuesday morning, which is runnable for the intrepid and skillful folks out there. But you’d better hurry: The forecast is calling for clear skies starting Wednesday. Meanwhile, flows on the Escalante River near Escalante, the Paria River near Kanab, and the Dirty Devil exceeded 2,000 cfs on Monday afternoon. But for these one’s it’s probably best just to sit on the canyon rim and watch the show, since American Whitewater recommends against running any of these rivers at these levels. But maybe this is just the dramatic ushering in of more gentle, widespread rains, and the flows will level out in the low-200s, making them quite floatable indeed.

• The Big flows on three of the above mentioned rivers will give a bit of a boost to Lake Powell inflows, while the Paria will supplement the waters moving past Lee Ferry from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin to its Lower Basin. So far, however, the storms are too isolated and short-lived to significantly slow Lake Powell’s decline. The reservoir’s surface level is currently at about 3,517.6 feet.
• Speaking of classic desert rivers, the sorrowful Lower Dolores River got a little bit of life back over the last few days as the storms moved into Western Colorado, pushing streamflows near its confluence with the Colorado above 600 cfs (after running below 30 cfs for the previous week). That’s good enough to float the lowest section of the river, which includes Stateline rapid, but the flows dropped back down below 100 cfs pretty quickly, which would leave anything but a SUP high and dry. What the rain gave to the river, it took from the roads: Highway 141 between Gateway and Whitewater was shut down Monday due to multiple debris flows; it had reopened as of Tuesday morning, according to the CDOT website. 
• Zion National Park was hit by the same wave of storms, leading to flash flooding and big water in the Virgin River. Rockslides shut down the Zion Mount Carmel Highway.

Note: I wrote the following essay for the Utah Monthly, an insightful newsletter that provides an inside look at the sometimes maddening, always spectacular, and often confounding state. 

This historical piece jumps off from a feature story I wrote for High Country News back in 2012. The thesis behind that story was that even as Utah and the Mormon Church moved rightward politically with a full-throttle embrace of capitalism, they paradoxically held onto slivers of the collectivism espoused by Brigham Young. Since then, Utah has continued its rightward slide, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has continued to grow its corporate empire. 

Reporting from Bloomberg shows the Church and its real estate arms own some 2.4 million acres in the U.S. worth more than $20 billion, and that they are ramping up efforts to develop some of that land. Tributary is a planned community under development in Aurora, Colorado, south of Denver International Airport and adjacent to I-70. It covers about 960 acres of former farmland along a creek, and it is designed to eventually house some 12,000 people. 

Where will the water come from? Given that this will be in Aurora, I’m guessing it will be from Aurora water, which is currently under stage 1 drought restrictions. 

Anyway, on to a bit of Western history … 

Mormonism’s Collectivist Roots
And what remains of it in our era of financialized capitalism

The curiously named community of Orderville sits in a narrow valley in southern Utah on the banks of the East Fork of the Virgin River. It is propitiously placed along the highway between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, yet it wasn’t until the last decade or so that businesses—a couple coffee shops, food trucks, and upscale glamping and vacation rentals—popped up to capitalize on the thousands of visitors passing through. But this isn’t just a modest farming community now taking up tourism. It was once the stronghold of the United Order communalist system, perhaps the most audacious economic experiment ever undertaken in the American West. Orderville, wrote historian Dean L. May, was for the Latter-day Saints a “near-successful effort to build the City of God on Earth.”

Over the last half-century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has wholeheartedly embraced free-market capitalism, and not only in ideological terms. The church is decidedly corporate, and owns Utah’s second-biggest newspaper, a book publisher, dozens of radio stations, financial companies, hotels, and restaurants. It spearheaded the $2 billion redevelopment of its land comprising a major portion of downtown Salt Lake City, and is one of the nation’s largest landowners, with about 2 million acres of agricultural, residential, and commercial properties across the United States. Up until McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, however, the church leaned strongly in the opposite direction, favoring a communal, even socialist approach to economics.

When Brigham Young led his followers into present-day Utah in 1847 to build a homeland, he championed industriousness combined with cooperation and central planning over the frontier individualism commonly associated with the western frontier at the time. The Mormons began with a cooperative effort to build an irrigation system that belonged to everyone, and then laid out the towns. “The towns and villages were not established inadvertently or by individual initiative … they were a result of very definite plans,” wrote Hamilton Gardner in Cooperation Among the Mormons in 1917.

This relatively loose-knit system worked to build communities, but it wasn’t clear that it could protect them from the Gentiles pouring into the region in search of land and wealth. In the 1860s, as the transcontinental railroad approached Utah from both sides, bringing with it an orgy of capitalism and greed, financed with credit that the banks handed out like lollypops, Young buckled down in an effort to protect his holy land from the invaders.

He formed the School of Prophets, which, writes Leonard J. Arrington, the late LDS church historian, “countered an energetic and powerful laissez-faire capitalism with a vigorous, well-organized, socially minded and theocratically directed program of economic action.”

That program included creating an organization to build the section of railroad that came closest to the capital, to keep out the riffraff that might otherwise do the work. It funded the creation of cooperative furniture and wool manufacturing along with other businesses, to reduce reliance on eastern imports. The School created the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution and instituted uniform pricing controls to minimize competition among Mormon merchants.

The Utah Territory successfully resisted becoming a mineral colony for the eastern industrialists, and the School disbanded in 1872. But Young, whose collectivist leanings grew as he aged, wanted yet more.

A chance for radical change emerged in September of 1873, when the Jay Cooke & Co. bank—one of the big railroad backers—collapsed. Other banks toppled like dominoes, foreclosures were rampant, and the Panic of 1873 swept the nation and the world, leading to one of the worst depressions in history.

Utah’s mining towns were hit hard. But Brigham City, a settlement of about 1,500 people, actually thrived. It had organized a mercantile cooperative in the pre-railroad days, and, by the time the panic hit, it had expanded into a major manufacturing enterprise mostly owned by the worker/shareholders. It built houses for the poor and widows and provided labor for jobless drifters, and its leaders instituted central economic and land-use planning and zoning, dictating where houses and factories and public transit should be built. Novelist Edward Bellamy, who visited Brigham City after the panic, reportedly drew inspiration for Looking Backward, his 1888 utopian novel set in a socialist Boston in the year 2000, when greed and capitalism are no more.

Young didn’t need to wait another century for utopia to arrive. In the aftermath of the 1873 panic, he set about spreading the Brigham City model—combined with an element of Joseph Smith’s Order of Enoch wealth-redistribution plan—across Deseret. He started in St. George and worked his way northward, converting communities to the order as he went.

Each adopted the order in its own way, but the core principals were the same: communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth. That this occurred just after the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, had been published in America bears noting, if nothing else. The language in the St. George United Order Constitution gives a sense of what Young was trying to do, mentioning the struggle between capital and labor, bemoaning the “oppression of monied monopolies” and railing against “a growing … spirit for extravagant speculation and over-reaching the legitimate bounds of the credit system; resulting in financial panic and bankruptcies.”

“It was clear to all that the United Order,” writes Arrington, in Great Basin Kingdom, “was an attempt to retard, and, if possible, to prevent the development of a market-oriented economy dependent on extensive importation and exportation.” About 200 communities implemented the Order. Some, like Brigham City, took a moderate approach. Others were quite radical.

Orderville fits into the latter category. The community was founded in the spring of 1875 by twenty-five families who had broken off from the Mount Carmel community a few miles down valley. The Orderville citizens pitched in to build houses surrounding a central plaza and common dining hall. All property was turned over to the community corporation, including land, livestock, and machinery. Decision-making was centralized. The population grew to 600, with around 200 acres of communal fields. The citizens built a sawmill, cabinet shop, woolen mill, shoe shop and tannery. Wealth was distributed evenly. Everyone ate together and wore locally made uniforms.

Orderville thrived in its collective state even as other southern Utah communities abandoned all or parts of the United Order. The community gained population and was able to quadruple its communal assets over just several years’ time.

Orderville’s successes, however, only highlighted the failures of the predominant, free-market system in use everywhere else, drawing resentment from the outside world. The timing wasn’t so great, either: In 1882, in a direct affront to the Utah Territory and the church, Congress passed the Edmunds Act, banning polygamy. A few years later, the feds rounded up and jailed hundreds of suspected polygamists, including in Orderville, leaving many communities leaderless. Church leaders, looking to remove yet another source of negative outside attention, urged Orderville to abandon its communal ways. The town’s leaders eventually complied—the central dining hall had been wiped out by a flood a few years earlier anyway—but kept the industries under communal ownership for another couple of decades.

By the early 1900s, the United Order had died in practice. For its part, the church continued to start its own businesses and to invest in other firms—sometimes to its own detriment. The aim, for the most part, was not to turn a profit, but to provide resources for its members. Still, the communalist spirit lived on, permeating the politics and the economics of the church for years afterward.

One of the embodiments of this spirit came in the form of a Utah Mormon banker and conservative Republican named Marriner S. Eccles. Eccles had long believed that hard work and thrift were all one needed to be successful. His father, David Eccles, had built up an empire on those principles, most famously owning the Utah Construction Company, one of six firms that built Hoover Dam and the largest company of its kind in the nation. The senior Eccles died in 1912, leaving everything to his children from two wives, one in Logan, one in Ogden. Though Marriner was in the lesser-endowed Logan branch, he ended up in Ogden, rose to the top of the bunch with his business acumen, and became president of Utah Construction Company, First Security Corporation, and several other interests. Then the Depression hit. Though Eccles’s wealth insulated him and his businesses, he noticed all around him people who had toiled and saved their whole lives, and who were now ruined, unemployed, even homeless.

“It is a national disgrace that such suffering should be permitted in this, the wealthiest country in the world,” he said. “The present condition is not the fault of the unemployed, but that of our business, financial, and political leadership.”

In 1933, Eccles and forty-five other citizens addressed Congress on ways to stop or slow the downward economic spiral. Most witnesses suggested that extravagance, nature, or God had caused the crash, and that balancing the federal budget was the only solution. Not Eccles. He said the root cause was maldistribution of wealth. There was plenty of money out there, it had just all ended up in the hands of a small group of the ultra-rich—the 1 percent, if you will—leaving the other 99 percent broke. That left the bulk of Americans not only hungry, but also without any of the purchasing power necessary to fuel the economy, and that’s what led to the crash.

How to fix the problem? The federal government had to raise taxes on the rich, forget balancing the budget, and spend like crazy in order to redistribute the wealth. Eccles’s five-point plan included allocating $500 million for unemployment and poverty relief, increasing funding to state and local governments for public works and infrastructure projects, and refinancing farm mortgages.

The approach was both compassionate and coldly rational. It would feed the hungry with direct handouts. And it would push a little bit of the wealth back into the hands of the working class, restoring the purchasing power of the masses. That, in turn, would revive consumption and jump-start industry, creating more jobs and more wealth. For as Eccles often said, “Labor is our only source of wealth.” Meanwhile, it would bolster the infrastructure of the nation, providing a foundation for future economic growth.

Trickle-down economics simply wouldn’t work. “The orthodox capitalistic system of uncontrolled individualism … will no longer serve our purpose,” Eccles said, echoing Brigham Young and presaging John Maynard Keynes’s 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—the basis for one of the principal schools of modern economic thought. “We must think in terms of the scientific, technological, interdependent machine age, which can only survive and function under a modified capitalistic system controlled and regulated from the top by government.”

Eccles, who was not a church leader but whose family remains powerful in Utah, became the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his theories provided the seeds of the New Deal. In 1936, around the same time that the federal government was launching its wealth redistribution effort, the church created its Welfare Program, which today spans the globe, providing food, shelter, medical help, and emergency aid to those in need.

The church adhered to the collectivist values of Smith, Young, and Young’s successor, John Taylor (also a strong proponent of wealth redistribution) for the next couple of decades. But when McCarthyism infected the nation in the 1950s, the Church’s communalist ways once again put them at odds with the nation’s mainstream. Then, maybe fearing more persecution, church leaders started an effort—perhaps concerted, perhaps not—to change their public image from borderline theocratic communists to full-on capitalists.

The ideological leader of this new, free-market, staunchly conservative Mormonism was Ezra Taft Benson, whom the church named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943. He served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture from 1953 until 1961, during which he became more and more rabidly anti-communist. In 1961, he told the church’s general conference: “No true Latter-day Saint and no true American can be a socialist or a communist or support programs leading in that direction.”

Benson was a contemporary, friend, and ideological twin of W. Cleon Skousen, the ultra-conservative political theorist whose teachings would influence the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, the Wise Use and Patriot movements of the 1990s, and the violent right-wing uprisings of the mid-2010s, including the armed occupation led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. Benson and Skousen both were strong supporters of the John Birch Society, which was considered extreme even by the likes of hardcore conservatives such as Barry Goldwater. The society’s founder, Robert Welch, derided Eisenhower as a communist and Benson concurred. And in 1963 Benson predicted that within the decade the United States would be ruled by a communist dictatorship, which would include military occupation, concentration camps, and the like.

Many church leaders considered Benson’s beliefs not only to be too radical, but also blatantly racist, and at times he was chided for being too political and too extreme—though his status as apostle was never threatened. Still, his beliefs trickled down into more tempered elements of the church. In 1966, Apostle Marion G. Romney, former Sen. Mitt Romney’s father’s cousin, felt compelled to use his entire speech to the annual LDS general conference to outline the differences between socialism and the United Order (distillation: the United Order has God, socialism doesn’t). And in 1999, Phillip J. Bryson, a professor at Brigham Young University, wrote a paper called “In Defense of Capitalism” to counter some LDS scholars’ anti-capitalist leanings.

These efforts served gradually to pull the church rightward politically, and in 1985, Benson was named the church’s thirteenth president, a position he held until his death in 1994.

Utah’s politics have long been dominated by the church—nearly 90% of the state’s legislature identify as practicing Mormons. As a result, the state’s politics tend to reflect the church’s. Prior to 1980, for example, the state’s voters were as likely to elect a Democratic governor or federal or state lawmaker as they were a Republican one. But during the Reagan era and, for that matter, the Ezra Taft Benson era, the state has become bright red, only electing Democrats to represent isolated liberal strongholds such as Salt Lake City.

During the same time-frame, the church shifted economically, as well. In 1960, a Canadian oil company executive named N. Eldon Tanner was appointed by then–church president David O. McKay as an assistant to the twelve; two years later he became an apostle. He introduced corporate financing to the church and pointed it to not only achieve solvency, but to become a full-on business empire within a few decades.

It’s the latter, capitalist version of Mormon history that the modern media has glommed onto. And it’s not inaccurate—under Young’s leadership, the church had its hands in a number of business enterprises, just like today—but it’s also not complete. There still is a faint undercurrent of the old United Order beliefs. The church’s welfare program and Deseret Industries continue to be a significant part of its larger workings, providing humanitarian assistance across the globe as well as food and clothing and jobs to people closer to home. And it’s safe to say that the church’s current capitalist successes are rooted in, and wouldn’t be possible without, Brigham Young’s collectivist, quasi-communist experiment from the late 1800s that played out in a tiny town called Orderville.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Click the link to go to the water center’s LinkedIn page:

June 24, 2026

Last Monday was the opening of conservation photographer Dave Showalter‘s exhibit, Living River: The Promise of the Mighty Colorado at Colorado Mesa University‘s Tomlinson Library! Visit the second floor to view this 20-piece visual journey and see how it encapsulates the resilience of the Colorado River and its keepers, illustrating how we can create an enduring watershed. The exhibit is free to the public, and free parking is available in specified lots until August 16th! We are excited to host this exhibit in partnership with the Tomlinson Library with the support from Braided River, and we look forward to sharing it with you all!

📅 June 15th Through December 2026
📍 CMU Tomlinson Library, Second Floor
⏰ Library Hours: https://lnkd.in/g69UwSkR
📋 Parking Information: https://lnkd.in/gFfEX6a7

Caroline Wagner, The Ohio State University

China’s rapid rise in science has hit a milestone. The country’s investment in research and development has reached parity with – and by purchasing power measures has surpassed – that of the United States, according to a March 2026 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Both nations have crossed the US$1 trillion threshold on research spending.

For 80 years, the U.S. operated the most productive scientific and technological enterprise in human history. Breakthroughs and advances that came from American labs included the internet; the mRNA vaccine; the transistor and its children, semiconductors and microprocessors; the Global Positioning System; and many more.

U.S. scientific and technological leadership was nurtured by sustained public investment in research universities and federal laboratories, as well as a culture of open inquiry. These investments turned scientific discovery into economic strength – accounting for more than 20% of all U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

In contrast, China had previously spent little to nothing on research and development. Some estimates show that China was among the lowest research spenders worldwide in 1980.

As a policy analyst and public affairs researcher, I study international collaboration in science and technology and its implications for public and foreign policy. I have tracked China’s rise across every major database for more than a decade.

The most recent reports showing that China is now outspending the U.S. on scientific and technological research is a turning point worth understanding clearly because, historically, global leadership in one sector – including technology and warfare – feeds into others. U.S. dominance is in question.

China’s systematic and unrelenting rise

China’s R&D spending milestone caps a series of achievements that have arrived in rapid succession.

In 2019, China surpassed the U.S. in its share of the top 1% most-highly cited papers – what some call the Nobel class of research. By 2022, it had taken first place globally in most-cited papers overall.

In 2024, China overtook the United States in total scientific publications – the first time any nation has displaced American dominance since the U.S. itself surpassed the United Kingdom in 1948. Researchers found that China overtook the United States in scientific output even earlier. That same year, China pulled ahead in the Nature Index, which tracks publications in the world’s most selective scientific journals, posting a 17% advantage over the U.S. in outlets long considered the gold standard of scientific excellence.

In 2024, Chinese entities also filed roughly 1.8 million patent applications, compared to the U.S.’s 603,191 applications.

Given these milestones, it’s possible to argue that China is quickly taking the lead in global science and technology. These are not isolated data points. They mark a structural shift in where the world’s scientific frontier is being built.

More science is good – the problem lies elsewhere

China’s ascent is, in one sense, good news. More knowledge, generated by more researchers across more institutions, expands the global pool of discovery from which everyone can draw. The world benefits when science thrives.

The problem is not that China is investing, but that the U.S. is not.

First, the U.S. is divesting from basic, open science. Federal R&D spending in the U.S. peaked in 2010 at roughly $160 billion and fell by more than 15% over the following five years. Federal investment in research and development has been in a long, slow slide – from a peak of 1.86% of gross domestic product in 1964 to about 0.66% in 2021.

The federal government is no longer the largest spender in R&D: It funded about 40% of basic research in 2022, while the business sector performed roughly 78% of U.S. R&D. While not a problem in itself, industry has simultaneously withdrawn from open scientific publication over the past four decades, shifting from research toward development. The result is a shrinking pool of openly shared scientific knowledge precisely as public investment in it also contracts.

Under the second Trump administration, U.S. government science agencies have been slow-walking proposals for new research. Current budget cuts from the White House threaten to deepen cuts to government spending significantly.

The second is the active restriction of scientific exchange: tightening access to U.S. institutions, scrutinizing international collaborations and raising barriers to foreign-born researchers. These policies, though intended as security measures, work against the openness that has historically made American science productive and attractive to global talent.

I describe this issue as an example of the stockyard paradox, in which securing research assets may weaken the very system these measures aim to protect.

Disinvestment cuts deeper than it appears

The deeper danger for the U.S. economy is that disinvestment and selective engagement in research erodes the capacity to use cutting-edge science regardless of where it is produced.

Absorbing and applying cutting-edge knowledge, whether developed in Boston or Beijing, requires maintaining research institutions and trained workforces, as well as active participation in global networks. This is not a passive process. You cannot free-ride on Chinese science if you have dismantled the institutional and human capital needed to evaluate, translate and apply it.

A nation that hollows out its research base not only falls behind but also progressively loses its ability to benefit from science, including in technologies it is already able to access.

Talent compounds the problem. The U.S. built its scientific dominance partly by being the destination of choice for the world’s most ambitious researchers. The U.S. leads the world in Nobel Prizes, but, notably, 40% of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics that were awarded to Americans since 2000 were won by immigrants. The flow of foreign talent is not guaranteed. It follows opportunity, funding and openness.

Researchers who might once have come to American universities are finding welcoming alternatives in Europe, China and elsewhere. https://www.youtube.com/embed/yLvO070E_dI?wmode=transparent&start=0 Around 75% of U.S. researchers are considering leaving the country due to the Trump administration’s funding policies.

A decision point, not a trend line

China’s milestone in research funding arrives at a moment when the U.S. is deciding whether to maintain its scientific leadership.

Scientific infrastructure does not decline gradually and recover on demand. Doctoral scientists represent a decade or more of training; tacit laboratory knowledge lives in working research groups, not in documents. Once talented young researchers leave the pipeline – or international talent redirects to other countries – the capacity is very hard to rebuild. Early warning signs are already visible in the U.S. system: thousands of NIH grants terminated, a collapse in international applications and an exodus of early-career scientists.

What is at stake is not a ranking. It is whether the U.S. maintains the institutional capacity – the universities, the federal laboratories, the graduate pipelines, the culture of open inquiry – that made those returns on scientific investment possible in the first place.

China’s rise did not create this decision point, although it brings it into sharp relief. Does the U.S. still want to lead in science? The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, estimates that a 20% cut in federal research and development starting in fiscal year 2026 would shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and reduce tax revenue by around $250 billion. Others point out that the scientific enterprise has contributed at least half of U.S. economic growth.

That is a lot to lose.

Caroline Wagner, Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.