By Amy Felegy for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration

Each eight-by-eight feet, two giant paintings look almost like sun eclipses. Chunks of coal fill a circle in one; pigments smear the canvas.

You wouldn't know just by looking at them, but those paintings created by John Sabraw contain paint sourced from longstanding pollution in a nearby stream.

"Iron oxide sludge," says Sabraw an art professor at Ohio University. "All orange and crusty."

Gross ... for a water body. But, beautiful for oil paint.

Sabraw is part of a network of researchers, scientists, and artists cleaning up Sunday Creek in southeastern Ohio, reworking that sludge into usable paint.

The area is part of more than 6,000 miles of streams throughout Central Appalachia that are far from crystal clear, caused by historic acid mine drainage.

Though much of the mining happened more than a century ago, Michelle Shivley says Ohio is still dealing with their environmental legacies. She's a director at True Pigments, a 2018-founded company working to restore seven miles of clean water and welfare along Sunday Creek.

"We still have streams that run orange, coming out of these holes in the ground that are connected to abandoned coal mines," Shivley says.

This particular Sunday Creek segment sees more than two million pounds of iron each year (that's around 13,500 five-gallon buckets every month!), causing high amounts of acidity and metal content in the water.

"The fish, the bugs, all those things that are typically in a stream or river, those things just can't survive in those kinds of conditions."

A branch of the U.S. Department of the Interior partially funds the project, which starts with extracting stream pollution and ends with filling paint tubes.

In between, Sabraw tests pigment for quality and consistency, and frequently takes his students out to the creek. The pigments are a huge part of his art practice.

"As I'm working with these pigments ... I just feel more connected to these kind of primal materials that make up our earth."

Pollution into Solution

Still, Shivley says all this effort hasn't meaningfully improved Sunday Creek water quality. It's why her team is designing a full-scale acid mine drainage treatment facility-and a bonus pigment production facility-expected to open next year.

The goal: Increase jobs in the area and help local stream life thrive.

"How can we use these abandoned mine land spaces and reclaim them," Shivley says. "And then transform them into something that can help with the transition for coal communities from a very extractive industry, energy driven economy, to something different that will carry them into the future in a meaningful way?"

She thinks her team has the answer.

The Process

• Pump water from underground mine pool (some stretching as large as 23 miles)


• Aerate water/remove carbon dioxide at treatment facility


• Use hydrogen peroxide to oxidize the iron, iron falls off


• Clarify water and stabilize pH


• Discharge clean water back into Sunday Creek


• Bring iron sludge to pigment production facility to de-water and dry it


• Sell the pigment! Works just the same as any pigment you pick up in any art store

The Trump administration's long-term plan for artificial intelligence could have far-reaching environmental impacts across the country.

His strategy calls for the removal of land use rules considered prohibitive to the construction of AI data centers. Last year, then Gov. Eric Holcomb announced Microsoft would invest $1 billion to establish a new AI data center in Laporte to generate cloud computing infrastructure.

Ben Murray, senior researcher for the advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said fossil fuel plants are already being reopened to help meet high energy demands.

"We just need to be aware that anything that prolongs our reliance on fossil fuel is going to increase the problems that we're seeing from the climate crisis," Murray explained.

Murray argued high-tech progress should not come at the expense of increased household energy prices. Residents' support is low due to concerns about increased traffic and noise near the centers. The Trump administration said environmental and permitting regulations will only slow America's dominance in the AI field.

A report last year found emissions from data centers owned by Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft were more than seven times higher than officially reported. Computer servers using AI require far more energy than those without. A ChatGPT query, for example, can use up to 10 times more electricity than a standard Google search.

"These companies can seem as if they're decreasing their emissions and meeting net-zero goals but in reality, the emissions are amping up faster than ever for these companies," Murray pointed out.

Murray noted the push for more data centers is already leading Big Tech companies to backtrack on their climate goals. It is possible to power AI services with renewable energy sources, he added, but doing so requires political will.

As of June 2025, a 1,200-acre corn and soybean field just outside of New Carlisle has turned into eight Amazon-led AI energy centers. The tech giant plans to construct a total of 30 at the site.


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After one year, Washington's first comprehensive bee survey has documented 15 species that have never been collected in the state before.

The project is cataloguing native bees, which includes nearly all species in the state, but excludes honeybees.

Karla Salp is a communications consultant with the Washington State Department of Agriculture's Washington Bee Atlas program, which conducted the survey.

She said the data will serve as a baseline to track bee populations.

"The reason why this is happening in the first place is to answer the question, how are pollinators doing in Washington state?" said Salp. "And the answer is we don't know, because we've never actually looked at even what bees we have throughout the state."

Salp said the project also involves compiling a list of plants that each bee species pollinates so residents can make their yards more attractive to these beneficial insects.

As honeybee numbers continue to decline rapidly, Salp explained that native pollinators may become more important to Washington's agriculture.

"Knowing what native pollinators we have and how we can support them is really a sustainability issue" said Salp, "to make sure that whether we have honeybees here or not, there are options for pollination."

Volunteers collected over 17,000 bees on more than 600 different host plants.

Salp said the process of identifying them is slow because each one must be viewed under a microscope, and there is still considerable work to be done.

"We're expecting to find a lot more species" said Salp, "that are either rare or even new to the state. "

If people are interested in volunteering, an online application for the Bee Atlas program is available on the Washington State Department of Agriculture website.




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The Trump administration wants to overturn a conservation rule that had garnered more public comment than any in U.S. history up until that time.

Commonly known as the Roadless Rule, the U.S. Department of Agriculture regulation prohibits road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvesting on nearly 60 million acres of national forest land.

Sarah McMillan - the senior attorney and director of the Wildlands & Wildlife Program at the Western Environmental Law Center - said before it was adopted in 2001, 1.5 million people submitted comments, with the vast majority in support of the rule.

"This was a rule that was carefully, thoughtfully developed," said McMillan. "There was a long process of inventorying these roadless areas and identifying these remote, often mature and old-growth trees. This didn't happen overnight."

A rollback of the rule would allow more logging and drilling on federal lands, which McMillan said would worsen climate change, harm wildlife & vital ecosystems, jeopardize water quality, and negatively affect recreational opportunities.

The Bush administration attempted to repeal the Roadless Rule in 2005, but lost in the courts.

In announcing the proposed rollback, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins claimed more logging would improve forest management, which would in turn decrease forest fires.

But McMillan said that argument is disputed in a 2020 Wilderness Society study that found just the opposite.

"The truth is, un-roaded areas burn at a significantly lower rate than areas with roads," said McMillan. "So, fires start near roads."

McMillan said it doesn't make sense to allow private developers to log more trees when the planet is undergoing a biodiversity and climate crisis - especially because old-growth trees create a buffer against climate change.

Forests cover almost 30% of New Mexico's land area.




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