I spend most of my working life talking with two distinct groups of people: journalists and conservationists. No matter where these conversations start, more and more of them are drifting toward the subject of artificial intelligence, drawn from every direction into the same vortex.

Like almost everyone else I know, the journalists and conservationists I talk to are annoyed by the uninvited appearances of AI in their daily lives, and seriously worried about its expanding effects on education, the climate, and society at large. But they also express a more profound dread, one I share but don’t always hear described by people in other fields. I think it’s worth paying attention to, in part because it can show us a way forward.

Journalism and conservation both involve what sociologist Allison Pugh calls “connective labor,” work that forges emotional understandings with others in order to accomplish its goals. In her illuminating book The Last Human Job, she explains that while connective laborers pay close attention to others, connective labor isn’t a one-way practice; it’s a series of collaborations that, relationship by relationship, helps weave our social fabric.

Journalists, at our best, carry out connective labor with our sources — even when those connections are antagonistic — and with the audiences we report to. Conservationists, at their best, carry out connective labor with the human communities they serve, and with other forms of life as well. (Not for nothing does a friend of mine call his work “conversation biology.”)

Through interviews with chaplains, teachers, hairdressers, doctors, and others, Pugh finds that connective labor confers dignity, purpose, and self-understanding on both practitioners and recipients. “Yet it is work that is essentially invisible, only partially understood, and not usually recognized, reimbursed, or rewarded, despite its ubiquity and importance,” she writes.

Though connective laborers and those they serve do benefit from some kinds of standardization, Pugh finds, the work is essentially artisanal, as every relationship has to be built from scratch. And artisanal means expensive. So corporate interests have long tried to reduce the cost of connective labor, starving it of the time and other resources it requires and attempting to replace it, in whole or part, with technology.

Journalists have been subjected to this squeeze for decades, with disastrous results for our careers, our audiences, and public discourse. Conservationists who work for nonprofit organizations, or in academia or government, have been less directly affected by corporate cost-cutting. But they, too, are suffering from growing workloads, shrinking job markets, and the burnout that results from trying to connect in circumstances that make connection impossible.

AI technologies provide corporations with yet another opportunity to assign connective labor to machines. This time, the machines can put on a pretty convincing performance of connection, but by definition, they can’t engage in the two-way relationships that connective laborers build. This, I think, is the main source of journalists’ and conservationists’ shared dread — the very real possibility that we will be replaced by technologies that can more or less simulate what we do, but can’t accomplish the work. We know what would be lost, and we know how much that loss would matter.

I think this fear also underlies journalists’ outrage about recent cases of other journalists using AI to circumvent the job’s connective labor; the willingness to fake connection feels like a betrayal of the whole craft.

While all this is terrifying, it’s also clarifying. The challenge for both journalists and conservationists isn’t to hide from AI or quixotically try to drive it into oblivion, but to find and create ways to keep practicing connective labor — and demonstrating its many benefits.

This week, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical letter that calls for the “disarming” of AI. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” the Pope states. Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, compares this papal call to the 1891 encyclical published by the previous Pope Leo, which warned against the excesses of the Gilded Age and set the stage for the New Deal. “Just as during the Industrial Revolution, a more just future begins with workers resisting against the abuses of the present,” Schneider writes, adding that worker demands for dignity in the face of AI are helping to shape new businesses and policy experiments.

The current Pope Leo describes the undertaking ahead in striking terms:

Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.

“Disarmed, welcoming, and accessible” AI technologies could ease any number of tasks for both journalists and conservationists. Data journalists, frontline conservationists, and conservation scientists are already putting narrow forms of machine learning to work in creative ways. I’m genuinely enthusiastic about AI applications that can help document the effects of conservation measures, serve as a “tireless, methodical reader” of underused archives, and otherwise advance conservation research. But the core work of tending our common home is, as Pope Leo writes, ecological in the deepest sense. It’s about strengthening, repairing, and protecting connections among the living, and it’s a human job.

Conservation at Work

• Thanks for the thought-provoking responses to “Conservation Is Not a Failure,” my post about ecologist Stuart Pimm’s call for more consistent measurement of what works in conservation. “True, one of the biggest frustrations in conservation is how hard it is to secure funding for long-term management and monitoring,” commented of . “Everyone wants to fund the exciting habitat creation. Far fewer want to fund the long-term management and monitoring needed to keep those habitats thriving and understand whether they’re actually working.” WILDLABS has established a “Boring Fund” to support the “foundational elements of conservation technology work” such as maintaining digital infrastructure and updating documentation. Where’s the philanthropist willing to support audacious acts of monitoring?

• John Reid, founder and former president of the Conservation Strategy Fund, calls for a return to “an environmentalism of places” (and kindly quotes me on the subject) in this recent Atlantic essay. “Decarbonization is a necessary environmental goal, but letting it overshadow more relatable ecological causes is a strategic blunder,” he writes.

• “Conservation was designed to be impressive at birth, not resilient across political seasons,” writes marine conservation biologist Rick MacPherson in The Revelator. “Durability is the real design challenge.” (Among many other enduring pursuits, Rick is the organizer of Ocean Hoptimism, a monthly gathering of ocean enthusiasts at Faction Brewing in Alameda, California. If you live in the Bay Area, stop by for a pint.)

• Can an ecosystem really “fail”? If so, who is it failing? John Drake, an ecologist who also trained as a philosopher, digs into the assumptions underlying ecosystem “malfunction” and “failure” in this essay for Aeon.

Finally, I’ve been entranced by Ada Limón’s new book Against Breaking, an adaptation of her closing lecture as U.S. Poet Laureate. During her service from 2022 to 2025, Limón led the Poetry in Parks initiative, which affixed panels of poetry on picnic tables in seven national parks. Given the Trump administration’s recent attacks on the Park Service, Limón’s choice to attach the poems to heavy furniture was prescient.

The current administration has succeeded in squelching globalchange.gov, the website that provided public access to the National Climate Assessments, but thanks to the efforts of former NASA staffers, the assessments — along with “Startlement,” the opening poem that Limón wrote for the Fifth National Climate Assessment — are available at climate.us.

The world says, What we are becoming, we are
     becoming together.

The world says, One type of dream has ended
     and another has just begun.

The world says, Once we were separate, 
     and now we must move in unison.

Ecologist Stuart Pimm is not exactly an optimist. After studying the rates and patterns of species extinctions for decades, he estimates that humans are accelerating extinctions by a thousandfold. His 2001 book, humbly titled The World According to Pimm, totted up the planet’s profits and losses from humanity and found us in serious debt.

But Pimm emphasizes that these ongoing catastrophes are not inevitable, and has long argued that conservation can work — if it collects, and follows, the necessary evidence. His latest review paper, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is a useful look at what’s known, what’s not known, and what’s needed to get to something like success. In an essay that accompanies the review, Pimm and his co-author John Gittleman write:

Conservation is not a failure — it’s actually achieving real results. But those results are uneven, sometimes inefficient, and often poorly tracked. The biggest limitation isn’t a lack of tools or knowledge about what works; it’s a lack of clear goals, consistent measurement, and transparency.

Pimm and his colleagues focus on the goals and targets adopted in late 2022 by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, especially the goals of halting “human-induced extinction of known threatened species” and, by 2050, reducing the extinction rate and risk of all species by tenfold. Though these are admirably measurable ambitions, they note, the targets intended to get us there are pretty vague, except for the much-discussed drive to protect 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by 2030. (My friends in conservation social science would remind us that “measurable” doesn’t necessarily mean “quantifiable” — qualitative data is data, too.)

With such goals in mind, Pimm and his co-authors attempt to summarize global progress toward protecting habitats and halting extinctions. Protected areas have expanded significantly in recent decades, they write, but they’re disproportionately located in cold, dry, and remote places. Where they exist, they do seem to work, reducing land conversion by an estimated 50% even when places unlikely to be converted under any circumstances are excluded from the calculation.

Meanwhile, humans are still accelerating extinction rates, but conservation efforts have helped avert some imminent extinctions and, in hundreds of documented cases, slowed or even reversed population declines.

Much is unknown, of course, and much is not known widely enough. Pimm and his coauthors suggest that conservation researchers focus on four especially pressing knowledge gaps: habitat destruction in oceans and drylands (much more difficult to monitor via remote sensing than the felling of forests); the extent of meaningful forest restoration worldwide (versus the plantations of non-native tree species sometimes advertised as restoration); and the real and potential contributions of Indigenous- and other community-led conservation efforts (widely recognized but, as I’ve previously written, incompletely documented, making them vulnerable to sidelining by governments and conservation institutions).

Pimm and his colleagues warn against sweeping claims about the dire state of biodiversity. They condemn as “fanciful” the Living Planet Index, published by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, which combines the population trends of tens of thousands of vertebrate species to estimate recent declines in global biodiversity. (The most recent index, published in 2024, estimated a 73% decline in biodiversity abundance between 1973 and 2020.) The practice of combining thousands of datasets to produce a single number is not only “irresponsible,” Pimm has said elsewhere, but “depresses people to no end” by obscuring the genuine, if limited, progress made in many places worldwide.

Pimm and his colleagues direct their advice to governments and large conservation groups, but there are lessons here for grassroots groups, too: any organization can benefit from setting measurable goals, consistently tracking progress, and communicating both successes and failures. Such efforts, assembled and distributed by projects like Conservation Evidence, can help humanity stop accelerating extinctions and instead accelerate recoveries — of populations, species, and the habitats they need.

Conservation At Work

• For a deep dive into the many assumptions underlying the global goals and targets adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity in late 2022, check out this thoughtful new paper in People and Nature.

• Helen Pearson, longtime editor at Nature and a terrific science journalist, has a new book out called Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works. An excerpt published in Slate features an appearance by Bill Sutherland of the Conservation Evidence project. Anyone want to buy a bat bridge?

• Worrisome evidence of a mental health crisis among conservation practitioners has sparked a valuable discussion in Mongabay: Jeremy Hance’s initial story in March led to a commentary by conservation leaders Vik Mohan and Nerissa Chao, a reflection by Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler, a commentary by several young members of the Conservation Optimism movement, and another commentary, by conservationists Jen Miller and Kelly Guilbeau, on the work already underway to build a “culture of care” within the profession. Miller and Guilbeau are co-founders of Revive, a Society for Conservation Biology working group focused on emotional resilience, and their article points to several other groups and resources.

• Did the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park create a transformative trophic cascade? The story is a restoration parable —thanks to a 2004 study that was repackaged as a viral video — but recent evidence suggests that the Yellowstone wolves created not a trophic cascade but a “trophic trickle.” Here’s the latest critique and the original researchers’ defense.

• Benji Jones, a senior correspondent at Vox, has an excellent explainer about the connection between gun sales and conservation. The initiated will know that the federal excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment used to fund state wildlife agencies is a pillar of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation — a game-centric model now in serious need of expansion, if not fundamental reimagining. Earlier this year, the Oregon Legislature took a significant step toward reforming the NAM when it passed a 1.25% increase in the statewide lodging tax to fund the implementation of the State Wildlife Action Plan.

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Finally, try this in your town: my friend Sarah Fox recently hosted a delightful conservation storytelling event for our community called “Bear Rubs, Oak Cavities, and Other Love Stories from the Gorge.” Sponsored by the Columbia Land Trust, it celebrated the critters and people who shape our place — and ended with the tale of a conservation meet-cute for the ages. 😍

Snail kites are common throughout Central and South America, but in the U.S., they’re found only in Florida. Even many Floridians don’t know that the Everglade snail kite exists, says author Hilary Flower — and if they do, they’re often not sure if it’s a snail or if it’s a bird. Flower, a Floridian herself, knows the Everglade snail kite better than most, and she tells the story of its unlikely survival in her new book The Kite and the Snail. Though the snail kite’s resourcefulness doesn’t let humans off the hook for conservation, she says, “I do find hope in the fact that wildlife can surprise us so much.”

Flower is an associate professor of environmental studies at Eckerd College. I edited our conversation for length and clarity.

MN: As you write, the Everglade snail kite is so perfectly adapted to eating native Florida apple snails that the curve of its bill matches the inner curve of the snail’s shell. So when the native snail declined in numbers due to wetland development, the kite was believed to be in trouble, too — which was true, but not the whole story. What really happened?

HF: When the Florida apple snail started declining in the early 2000s, after a couple of severe droughts, the Everglade snail kite was on extinction watch. In 2004, an invasive South American apple snail started to take off, and the snail kites started following the explosions of this snail around the state. The new snail can be five or six times larger than the native snail, so when the snail kites would grab them and try to fly off, they would drop them, or they would get them to a perch and then couldn’t get their bills far enough into the shell to extract the snail. They would sometimes work on a snail for an hour and then drop it.

MN: And so there was a worry that the invasive snail was going to be the last straw, right? That it was going to be a kind of decoy that would just sap the snail kites’ energy.

HF: Yes, there was. But what was happening was that the snail kites were adapting to this new snail in real time. I talked to a field scientist who said that over the course of just a couple of years, he watched them figure out how to reach further back and get the meat out of these bigger snails. And though they were used to foraging for snails on marsh vegetation, they figured out that the invasive snail loves this invasive aquatic plant called hydrilla. In Lake Toho, where the invasive snail first exploded, the snail kites started foraging for snails on these rafts of hydrilla in the deep part of the lake. They would stand on the hydrilla and get the snail meat out of the shells.

MN: And it took a while for many people to realize this, because they were looking for the Everglade snail kite in the Everglades, and it truly was declining in the Everglades, but it had set up shop in habitats that were quite a distance from the Everglades.

HF: Yes, they can now be found hundreds of miles from the Everglades. When I was starting this project, my first job was to find a snail kite, which I hadn’t seen in a decade. I live in Tampa, so normally I’d be driving several hours south to the Everglades, but to find them, I had to drive several hours north to Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park — and there they were.

MN: And how is the Everglade snail kite doing now?

HF: After the invasive snail took off, the snail kites continued to decline for several years, but by 2013 they were on the rise, and by 2017 their statewide population was back up to about 3,000 birds, where it had been at the beginning of the century. Since then, their numbers have been holding pretty steady.

MN: So you make very clear in your book that snail kites in Florida still face plenty of threats, and that not every species is as flexible as the snail kite. But this project did make you think differently about endangered species. Can you tell me a bit about that?

HF: While I was working on this project, I talked to the evolutionary biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant, and I asked them whether we could find any hope in wildlife’s ability to adapt. And they said, basically, not on any scale. The fate of wildlife is going to be decided by humans. But I do find hope in the fact that wildlife can surprise us so much. There’s so much we don’t know. I mentioned that the invasive snail explodes when there’s been a disturbance — well, the disturbance that caused them to explode on Lake Toho was a restoration project. Things can go worse than we expect, and things can go better than we expect. And sometimes the worst outcome can have a weird silver lining. The snail kite gives me some humility about how big the world is, and how much is going on at all times and interacting and producing different results, and how, in some ways, we’re just another kind of creature, muddling around on the planet.

MN: You’re saying there is some refuge to be found in uncertainty — that there are species we may assume are going to decline, but they can still surprise us, and we’re still in a conversation with them. They still have agency.

HF: They have agency. The landscape has a life of its own. If you’re playing a game and you think, “You know what? Our team’s gonna lose,” then in your mind, the game’s over. As an environmental studies professor, I’m always trying to tell my students that the game’s not over. That they should go give it their all. But there is so much bad news. And so the snail kites are a reminder that the ball is very much in play — that there are all kinds of other people out there, doing their best, and the animals are doing their best, too.

MN: What are you working on now?

HF: My current project is on the flamingo, so I’m having a lot of fun learning about a species that did get extirpated from Florida — to the point that we didn’t even put it on the endangered species list — and now it’s coming back. So here’s a species that’s saying, “Okay, you don’t think we’re native, but we’re foraging over here.” It’s another amazing animal that’s full of surprises. And I’m tagging along with people who are in the scrum, trying to find out how to help this bird. It’s a mess, and I guess I just find the mess invigorating and fascinating.

Conservation at Work

• The residents of Oppdal, Norway, recently organized an “interspecies council,” and The Guardian has a firsthand report. In other more-than-human news, Nature profiled conservationist Anne Poelina, whose scientific publications name the Martuwarra Fitzroy River of Western Australia as their first author.

• “Rather than treating Siri with respect because it impersonates a woman, we should demand that Siri stop impersonating a woman.” Cory Doctorow on the personhood of nature and the (un)personhood of chatbots.

• What is conservation, anyway? of has an excellent thread on the subject.

• And while we’re asking deceptively simple questions, who does the work of conservation? The researchers of the Conservation Labor Project are trying to find out, and you can help by completing their survey. Tommy Serafinski of the Conservation and Science Podcast has an interview with CONLAB researchers Anwesha Dutta and Nick Harvey.

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  Finally, check out this fine new reporting by my colleagues at High Country News: the writers and editors of our Indigenous Affairs Desk gathered these illuminating reflections by tribal leaders after a year of Trump, and contributing writer Christine Peterson hiked into the Greater Yellowstone to document the damage done by DOGE.

Last October, I attended a conference in Jackson, Wyoming, called “Managing Wildlife in Large Landscapes,” convened by the University of Wyoming’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. Despite coinciding with the beginning of (yet another) federal shutdown, it was a lively event, featuring conversations among park managers and conservation advocates from the U.S., South Africa, Mongolia, Peru, Sápmi, and elsewhere. During a panel about human-wildlife coexistence, Lesli Allison, the executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, said something that I’ve been reflecting on since:

Stewardship is the overlooked and most important leg of the conservation stool. When people talk about conservation, they usually talk about preservation and restoration. Stewardship is the active care and daily management of land and natural resources to ensure their health and productivity into the future. It means managing our forests and rangelands and croplands not just for food and fiber but for their full range of values, including clean water and wildlife and a healthy climate. When there is good stewardship, the need for preservation and restoration diminishes, and in fact, protection without stewardship is incomplete.

A look back at my own writing shows that I often do talk about protection (or preservation) and restoration without mentioning stewardship — including, until right this minute, on my own dang About page. I suspect the same is true of many conservationists steeped in Western perspectives.

I don’t dispute the importance of stewardship as Allison defines it. Far from it. And many fine conservation initiatives do emphasize the importance of stewardship. At some level, though, I think I’m reluctant to admit — or remind others — that even most protected ecosystems need to be cared for by humans in order to flourish, especially given how thoroughly our species has altered the planet. Forests in legally designated wildernesses may need cultural burns or other forms of prescribed fire; wild and scenic rivers may need their banks stabilized or their water quality monitored; as climate extremes become norms, protected habitats may need to be planted with species more resilient to heat and drought.

For those of us raised to romanticize landscapes that seem beyond human reach, this pervasive need for stewardship can look like a tragedy. It’s no longer possible, if it ever was, to protect a place and just leave it in peace.

But this impossibility is also an opportunity. The modern conservation movement is very good at describing the harm humans can do to land, air, and water. It’s not so good at showing people how to repair that damage, much less avoid inflicting it in the first place. The many tools and traditions of stewardship help people to live well within the ecosystems that sustain them, from city parks to farm fields to remote forests — to practice, in other words, what Aldo Leopold called “the oldest task in human history.”

To acknowledge that the stewardship of all these places is as important as their protection and restoration is to remind ourselves that conservation is not a single act but a relationship, an active, ongoing process in which each of us has a constructive role to play.

Conservation at Work

• Speaking of stewardship, I had the pleasure of attending one of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Plant Baby Plant events in Portland, Oregon, last week. The rallying cry of Plant Baby Plant, which just celebrated its first anniversary, is “raise a garden, raise a ruckus” — and its expansive definition of “garden” includes “a restored prairie, a healthy forest, a revitalized public park, or any landscape shaped by sustained care and attention.” I like that Kimmerer isn’t plowing new ground, so to speak, but using her star power to energize stewardship projects already underway. The event I attended was hosted by the SLUG (Student-Led Unity Garden) Project at the University of Portland, and was enthusiastically attended by all ages in spite of the cold rain and wind.

• The number of monarch butterflies overwintering in the forests of central Mexico is up for the second year in a row, reports WWF Mexico. The heartening increase is probably due to all the rain in the U.S. Midwest last year, which led to more flowers for butterflies to feed on during their southward migration this fall. But monarch biologist Karen Oberhauser told Benji Jones of Vox that backyard gardens may have also played a part. “Our efforts can make a difference,” she said. Plant baby plant.

• Also from the Glimmer of Hope Department, Panamanian golden frogs are back in their former habitat. Captive-raised frogs were released late last year as part of a study of the dynamics of Bd, the fungal disease that extinguished the free-living population of the species in the early 2000s. Though Bd is still a threat to frogs worldwide, some populations may be acquiring resistance to the disease.

• I appreciated this review of recent research on awe, which reports that “awe can help individuals reorient their worldview away from human dominance towards an outlook where their personal concerns are balanced with the needs of others and the environment.” Let’s try replacing fear appeals with awe appeals.

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  Finally, I was surprised and then amused to see myself quoted in Isabel Ruehl’s thought-provoking review of Rob Macfarlane’s wonderful book Is a River Alive? I stand by my characterization of nature writing as the Most Hated Genre, if only because so many of its own practitioners like to crap on it. Maybe we could start to overcome its limits by simply calling it … writing.

Last month, of wrote a viral essay called “What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion?” In it, she considers an exchange between Trevor Noah and Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, during a December 2025 interview.

After noting that Republicans have been “pretty good at imagining and hoping” in recent years, Noah wondered if the Democrats’ relative lack of vision could be partly explained by “the decline of religion on the left.” In the subsequent discussion, Noah observed:

[O]ne of the things that faith requires of you is an ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen.

Mamdani agreed, adding that during his mayoral campaign, he saw that “it’s often in houses of worship where New Yorkers still have that trust, still have that faith. And it’s by and large lost when it comes to politics.”

In her essay, Bucar likens Noah’s description of faith to Catholic theologian David Tracy’s concept of the “analogical imagination.” Religious traditions, Tracy argues, teach people to pay “disciplined attention to what reality itself suggests is possible” — or, as Bucar puts it, “how to look at the world as it is and simultaneously hold in their minds what it could become,” establishing among their adherents a “costly, sustained trust” in the possibility of a better future.

Bucar wonders how those without religious traditions learn the kind of disciplined attention that leads them to trust in possibility. “What gives you practice believing transformation is possible when every piece of evidence says otherwise?” Bucar concludes. “I genuinely don’t know.”

When I first read this essay, I thought, oh, I know! Or, at least, I know how I cultivate my belief in transformation: by observing the living world.

The sight of a mushroom busting through the leaf litter is a good cure for despair, I find; so is my teenager, who gains wisdom every week (and won’t appreciate being compared to a mushroom, but it’s a compliment, I promise).

The living world also shows us that our species, despite its faults, can bring about positive transformations. The recent removal of four dams from the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California has led to a speedy recovery of the river’s salmon; reintroductions in the Western U.S. have led to politically fraught but ecologically significant recoveries of wolves and bison.

Believing that salmon like free-flowing rivers is, I’ll admit, a lot easier than believing that the current global slide toward authoritarianism will one day reverse course. That’s where Tracy’s “analogical imagination” comes in. Paying attention to the transformative potential of fish, or rivers, helps me imagine analogous transformations in politics and human societies (and almost keep a straight face while doing so). I don’t have faith that such transformations will happen, but I do have faith that they can happen, and that goes a long way toward getting me out of bed in the morning. Call it a religion, if you like; in these times, I call it a means of survival.

Earlier this week, Jeremy Hance of Mongabay published a distressing but important story about the mental health of conservation practitioners, documenting what conservationist and physician Vik Mohan describes as a “growing epidemic of suffering” in the field. “Twenty years ago, you came into conservation with a much greater sense of optimism,” Mohan says, “whereas now, you cannot escape the urgency and the enormity of the crisis.”

It’s one thing for me, in my relatively comfortable surroundings, to cultivate my analogical imagination. It’s quite another for those on the front lines of conservation, many of whom regularly suffer the losses of beloved places, species, and even colleagues while enduring difficult conditions and low pay.

These conservationists need more material support, Mohan emphasizes, and professional cultures that encourage them to work to their capacity instead of attempting, at their peril, to meet the (unending) need. But he suggests that they, too, can find solace and inspiration in the living world they strive to protect, difficult though its potential can sometimes be to discern. “Perhaps the most important message,” says Mohan, “is that change is possible.”

Conservation at Work

• I was happy to see the Lonely Conservationists (whose motto is “But together, we aren’t so lonely anymore!”) featured in Hance’s Mongabay article. Founded by Australian ecologist Jessie Panazzolo in 2019, the group is a wonderful source of support for conservation practitioners.

• Over the past several months, I’ve spoken with dozens of conservationists whose careers, lives, and crucial projects were disrupted by the Trump administration’s abrupt and chaotic dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2025. That reporting resulted in “The Future of Conservation Without U.S. Aid,” part of a package of stories published by bioGraphic last week. Thanks to my excellent editor and her colleagues for all their support.

• I’ve previously written about conservation biologist Kent Redford and his call for the conservation of microbial communities; a new essay by Redford, published in Oryx, advocates a “three-stranded” approach to conservation that improves on what’s already working; extends existing efforts to achieve new and better conservation results; and develops novel tools ranging from synthetic biology techniques to methods of calculating future conservation value. “[P]erched at the trailing edge of the Holocene, oppressed by the triple assaults of biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution,” Redford writes, “we are looking for hope from the powerful creativity and passion that fuels the conservation movement.”

• I was going to write about the “evidence problem” in conservation — the subject of an editorial in Nature last month — but Mongabay founder beat me to it, so I’ll send you to his commentary instead. (Suffice to say that rather than an evidence problem or an “evidence emergency” — another term invoked by Nature — I see an already well-established field of research that deserves a lot more support.) I’ll also second Butler’s recommendation of this piece by Tanya O’Garra, chair of the Society for Conservation Biology’s Impact Evaluation Working Group, which makes a persuasive case for counterfactual studies as a means of documenting causes and effects in conservation.

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Finally, chag Purim sameach to those who celebrate! Baking renews my faith in transformation, too — especially when it leads to apricot hamantaschen.

Rachel Carson’s “Fable for Tomorrow,” the opening chapter of Silent Spring, may be the most famous three pages in all of environmental literature. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” she writes. But all was not as it seemed, for a “strange blight” sickened and killed cows, sheep, people, birds, and bees. In her final lines, she reveals the culprit:

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the birth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

As I wrote recently, Silent Spring and its fable worked brilliantly, bringing unprecedented public attention to invisible environmental threats. “A Fable for Tomorrow” made clear that Carson was after not superficial fixes but a serious overhaul of the role of synthetic chemicals in modern life. Carson’s opponents in the chemical industry, recognizing the breadth of her critique, assailed her for using a literary device. Their fear of the fable was well-founded: Silent Spring eventually led to a national ban on the synthetic pesticide DDT and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and it shaped the worldwide environmental movement we know today.

“A Fable for Tomorrow” has been imitated countless times, with and without attribution, and no wonder. We environmental writers can only hope our words move readers as much as Rachel Carson’s did. But the power of “A Fable for Tomorrow,” I’ve come to think, is like that of a really good jump scare. It’s marvelously effective, but it only works once.

Scott Slovic, an environmental humanities scholar who recently retired from the University of Idaho, has studied Carson’s fable alongside narratives employed by other well-known environmental writers. Like most of these writers, Carson employs what Slovic calls “the language of warning”; in psychological terms, it’s a fear appeal. She also uses a relatable place or person to represent a large-scale threat — in her case, the composite “town in the heart of America” suffers all the worst effects of pesticide overuse.

These two strategies, combined with Carson’s deep research, literary talent, and excellent timing, made “A Fable for Tomorrow” a classic. But even contemporary imitators couldn’t scare readers out of their chairs as Carson had. In today’s information environment, where we’re saturated with real and exaggerated fear appeals, fables can still persuade and motivate — but they need more rhetorical tools.

Slovic argues that enduring environmental “fables” (both he and I are using the term loosely) still achieve what he calls poignancy, or deep emotional impact, by using the language of warning and employing relatable places and people. But they also use stories of vulnerability and dramatic change, and leaven the language of warning with “the language of hope.” Especially promising, he says, are stories that strengthen “the perception of collective efficacy” by highlighting the achievements of people working together.

In a previous post, I suggested that conservation advocates unlearn their dependence on fear appeals and take heart — and a cue — from the global popularity of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass. Slovic’s analysis helps explain the book’s appeal: its intertwined essays employ all of these rhetorical tools, gracefully inviting readers to join a collective effort to restore and repair.

Another beloved “fable” that uses many of these tools is Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” published in 1949, which uses the powerful image of a dying wolf to represent both wildness and vulnerability; relates, in fictionalized terms, the author’s dramatic conversion from predator killer to predator champion; and combines the language of warning (“too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run”) with the language of hope (misquoting Thoreau’s much-misquoted line “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”) For more examples of these tools at work in environmental storytelling, see this 2024 talk Slovic gave at Brown University.

Slovic emphasizes that his analysis is a guide, not a formula, and his latest work demonstrates that no message is guaranteed to succeed. For a study published in the current issue of BioScience, Slovic and his co-authors tested some of the rhetorical strategies he identified by varying the language used in the 2024 State of the Climate Report, part of a long-running series of “warnings to humanity” published by the Alliance of World Scientists.

Slovic and his collaborators found that while the original language of the report, which relies on fear appeals, was ineffective, their variations didn’t do much to inspire readers, either. “Clearly, more work is needed to find the right messages that can break through and overcome the ideological divides deepening the issues reported in the present article,” they conclude. Indeed.

Conservation at Work

• I recently wrote about Republican efforts to disrupt the conservation of U.S. public lands by expanding the application of an obscure law called the Congressional Review Act. The good people of Next Interior have laid out a plan for repealing the CRA, including a handy sample bill. Let’s find this bill some sponsors!

• The new group Ground Shift, which like Next Interior is billing itself as something of a think tank for post-Trump public-land stewardship, has a diverse advisory board that includes both Mark Rey (who environmental groups dubbed the “Darth Vader of Forest Policy” during his tenure as a U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary during the George W. Bush administration) and Tracy Stone-Manning (who directed the Bureau of Land Management during the Biden administration and is now president of The Wilderness Society). We’ll see if Ground Shift can come up with a coherent vision, but that this crew has found common cause speaks to the radicalism of the Trump administration.

• I’m making an educated guess that Ground Shift is the unnamed group Dr. Len Necefer lambastes in “I Said Environmentalism Was Out of Ideas. I Was Wrong. It’s Worse.” Dr. Len argues that the professionalization of the mainstream environmental movement has created advocates who know how to navigate the federal bureaucracy but have lost touch with “the reality of what climate change actually feels like.” Like Dr. Len’s earlier essay “Environmentalism Is Out of Ideas,” which I responded to here, I think this one applies a much-needed critique way too broadly. We absolutely do need large, wealthy environmental organizations to move a lot more funding (and more of the job of persuasion) to groups on the climate and conservation front lines. But if we ever get the chance to repair our damaged national conservation institutions — and may we be so lucky — we’re going to need a bunch of good policy wonks. Groups like Ground Shift and Next Interior are working to convene the latter.

• Speaking of institutions, I appreciated this Aeon essay about institutions as “social technologies” that can amplify our cooperative tendencies.

• I’m also appreciating by , director of Nature Recovery at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust in the UK. Conservation wisdom gained from hard work on the ground.

• February 7 was the fourth annual Reverse the Red Day, which celebrates species recoveries around the world. Among the noted recoveries this year is that of the Bermuda snail, which is safe from extinction after a decade-long captive breeding and reintroduction effort. Also making progress is one of my favorite species, the adorably ugly purple frog of Kerala, India, which has expanded its range thanks to a multipronged conservation effort.

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  Finally, in other recovery news, real frogs are returning to the “Frog Wall” in Santa Barbara, California. The Santa Barbara Independent tells the story of this local shrine and its new caretaker.

This month, it’s been difficult for those of us in the U.S. to pay attention to anything other than the events unfolding in Minneapolis and St. Paul — the horrific killings and abductions by federal agents, the courage of the tens of thousands of Minnesotans who are standing up for their neighbors (and, while they’re at it, demonstrating that their communities are cohesive because of their diversity, not despite it). If you care about conservation, though, you may have also heard that Congressional Republicans are messing with the Boundary Waters.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a maze of glacial lakes that stretches for 150 miles along the border between Minnesota and Ontario, is many things. It is the most-visited designated wilderness in the country; it is one of the places where the Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, and Grand Portage Bands of Chippewa exercise their treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. It is famous for its extraordinarily clean water and its abundance and variety of biting insects. It is part of an international network of protected public lands that includes the rest of the Superior National Forest, Voyageurs National Park, and, in Canada, Quetico Provincial Park.

What Congressional Republicans are up to in the Boundary Waters threatens to undermine the whole practice of conservation on U.S. public lands, but understanding why requires some wonky background. Here goes.

Last week, the House of Representatives approved a resolution, introduced by Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota, that would use a 1996 law called the Congressional Review Act to reverse a Biden-era ban on mining and geothermal leasing in a quarter-million acres of national forest lands within the Boundary Waters watershed. In related news, the Government Accountability Office recently responded to a request by Rep. Celeste Maloy of Utah with a non-binding opinion stating that the Congressional Review Act could also be used to cancel the current management plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

The Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn federal agency rules, was successfully invoked only once between 1996 and 2016. Since the beginning of Trump’s first term, though, Congress has applied the act much more frequently, overturning 18 rules last year alone. Among these rules were plans and policies that had taken years to develop, including energy-conservation standards for various appliances and resource management plans for three Bureau of Land Management offices. Significantly, once a rule has been overturned via the Congressional Review Act, the relevant agency is prohibited from issuing any rule that is “substantially the same” without Congressional permission.

The goal of Stauber, Maloy, and their allies, apparently, is to give Congress the power to veto almost any rule issued by a federal government agency. Conservation groups are, to put it mildly, alarmed.

Hang on, though. The modern conservation movement has a long history of top-down, anti-democratic interventions. Plenty of people would argue that Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, singlehandedly designated by President Clinton under the Antiquities Act, continued that dubious tradition. Congress is the branch of the federal government that, at least in theory, most directly represents the people. Wouldn’t an expansion of Congressional power over conservation represent, as some are claiming, a step in the right direction?

This isn’t a rhetorical question, at least not for me. It’s worth wrestling with, and it doesn’t have a simple answer.

History teaches us that, in general, conservation should move from the bottom up, not the top down. Conservation solutions developed by those who depend on the landscapes being conserved have a better shot at succeeding — both because they’re more appropriate to their place and because they enjoy local support. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt recognized this when, after the surprise designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996, he established a process for monument proposals that took local concerns into account. (He later helped create the Conservation Lands Foundation, which supports community organizations that advocate for their local national monuments and other protected public lands.)

Ecology teaches us that conservation has to operate on multiple scales, for the basic reason that life operates on multiple scales. Some forms of life never move an inch; others travel from pole to pole. Some live only days; others live generations. So while the most successful conservation efforts tend to have deep local roots, not all can be managed locally. Large-scale, long-lasting conservation requires large, enduring institutions. And even small-scale efforts are most effective when coordinated across space and time. Fikret Berkes, a Canadian ecologist with deep experience in community-led conservation, writes that while conservation efforts should strive for “as much local solution as possible,” they also need “institutional interplay.”

The conservation plans and policies targeted by the Congressional Review Act were developed over many years and with many layers of public input. These processes are very far from perfect, and the Trump administration’s attacks on the National Environmental Policy Act may well make them worse. At their best, though, they incorporate local concerns and knowledge while providing the stability and reach needed to conserve public lands at the regional and national levels.

The expanding interpretation and use of the Congressional Review Act would allow a simple majority of Congress to trash any of these policies at any time — and, worse, prohibit their replacement, silencing all those who helped shape them in the first place.

Think of it this way: Using the Congressional Review Act and claiming that you’re advancing democracy is like yelling at your family and claiming that you’re improving household communication. Dangling a Congressional veto over U.S. public land plans and policies might resemble democracy in some ways, but it wouldn’t accomplish democracy’s goals — and it would make effective conservation impossible.

For continuing coverage of U.S. public lands — including the multiplying misuses of the Congressional Review Act — please read and support the work of More than Just Parks, Our Public Lands and Waters, and the crack investigative team at .

Finally: tell me about your favorite essays!

Twenty-five years ago, the science-fiction writer Octavia Butler published an essay in Essence titled “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” She advised her readers to learn from the past (“to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet”); to respect the law of consequences (“I don’t believe we can do anything at all without side effects”); be aware of their perspective (“where we stand determines what we’re able to see”); and count on surprises.

Butler, who died in 2006, was better at the prediction business than she would ever know. Her novel Parable of the Talents, released in 1998, foresees the election of an autocratic U.S. President who campaigns on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” The exploitative policies of his administration usher in a violent movement determined to “purify” the nation.

The near-future California of Parable of the Talents is hair-raisingly familiar in other ways, too, beset by wildfires, drought, and fake news. But Butler was no magician. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now,” she wrote in her Essence essay, “and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” Doing so allowed her to imagine, correctly, that a future leader would repurpose Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again” slogan for even darker ends; that climate change would make our daily lives a lot less comfortable and much more dangerous.

I thought about Butler’s advice while reading this year’s “horizon scan” of emerging issues in conservation. The scan, published annually in Trends in Ecology and Evolution since its start in 2009, aims to identify issues that are largely unknown within conservation but likely to have a significant impact on the field within the next five to 10 years. Two dozen or so conservation scientists, practitioners and policymakers participate in the selection process, ranking submitted issues by their novelty, the likelihood of their future influence on conservation, and the probable importance of that influence.

This year’s list, like its predecessors, includes new threats emerging from neglected problems (saltier seas are speeding up Antarctic ice melt); side effects (the fiber-optic cable deployed by drones in war zones is damaging wildlife habitat; GLP-1 drugs may reduce the amount of land deforested for beef production); shifts in perspective (the new Tropical Forests Forever Facility is a conservation finance mechanism led by, rather than imposed on, the Global South); and warnings of unpleasant surprises (look out for mirror life). Butler would approve.

Conservationists, understandably, tend to be preoccupied with current emergencies: the habitat about to be lost, the imminent extinctions. Few spend much time predicting threats five, 10, or 30 years away, much less preparing for them. As Butler argued, though, “prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses.” She was uncannily good at seeing the future, but all her futures were warnings, not inevitabilities. We ignored her once; let’s learn from the past, and keep an eye on the horizon.

Conservation at Work

• “These days, I am often unhappy, but I am filled with hope,” writes Cory Doctorow, another remarkably prescient science-fiction novelist (who hastens to say that he does not predict the future). Doctorow argues that while optimism “is the belief that things will get better no matter what we do,” hope is a method, a stepwise approach to progress: “If I do something about this situation, I might change it enough that I can do something else about this situation.” I’ve long been wary of hope as a prerequisite for action, but I like this definition of hope as action.

• For a defense of optimism, see on Victor Frankl’s concept of “tragic optimism,” which counsels action even when the horizon is darkest. No matter what you call it, positive action without expectation is the order of the day — in conservation and otherwise.

• Last week, the global High Seas Treaty entered into force after more than 20 years of planning and negotiations. The treaty, officially known as the United Nations Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement or BBNJ, is designed to protect life in the high seas — the two-thirds of the ocean that lie beyond national control. Eighty-three countries have now ratified the treaty; though the the United States signed in 2023, support from the 67 Senators required for ratification is still a long way off. For more on what the BBNJ could mean for marine life, see in Mongabay and Callum Roberts in Oceanographic.

• The debut of the High Seas Treaty was especially heartening during a month when the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from 66 international organizations including the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The move, announced on January 7, was overshadowed by the news of the killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota; now, Nature has an in-depth look at the implications [registration required for full access].

• “Although conservation has evolved substantially to be more inclusive, the path trajectories of the racist European colonial past create patterns of marginalization and othering that inform the present.” This important paper about the legacies of colonial conservation, authored by Moreangels Mbizah and colleagues, is … paywalled. Come on, Nature!

• Mia Keady, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, finds evidence that the conservation of perennial prairies requires a perennial approach to conservation: “In a time of intense environmental degradation, society desperately needs to support agricultural transitions to perennial systems that maintain soil carbon, produce food, and protect critical ecosystem services,” she writes. “Supporting well-trained and inspired conservation staff is critical to this equation.”

• My friends and colleagues at Wildlife Investigative Reporters and Editors (WIRE) have just launched a newsletter about their important work. Sign up here.

Finally, a question for the ages from . What do you do, exactly?

I’m resharing this post from New Year’s Day 2025 because a) it may be new to you and b) Woody’s New Years Rulin’s are forever. Shine your shoes, wash your teeth, beat fascism. Happy 2026.

On January 1, 1943, Woody Guthrie wrote 33 resolutions across the center pages of his notebook. His “New Years Rulin’s” range from the highly specific and practical (“Wash teeth if any”; “Change socks”) to the grandly aspirational (“Beat fascism”; “Love everybody”). Though they’re the product of a particular time and a particular life (“Help win war”; “Send Mary and kids money”) they remain in circulation today. Their folksy charm is hard to resist, but the real reason for their longevity, I think, is their devastating clarity.

Guthrie had many faults and many gifts, and one of his greatest gifts was his ability to say very important things with very few words. He deployed it not only in his more than 3,000 songs but throughout a lifetime of talking and scribbling. Consider Guthrie’s incisive definition of a folk song.:

A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be whose hungry and where their mouth is, or whose out of work and where the job is or whose broke and where the money is or whose carrying a gun and where the peace is — that’s folk lore and folks made it up because they seen that politicians couldn’t find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job of work.

In 1933, a decade before Guthrie made his New Year’s resolutions, a young German journalist named Charlotte Beradt began to ask her neighbors about their dreams. Like her, she learned, many were plagued by nightmares about surveillance and involuntary complicity; the Nazi propaganda machine had already occupied their unconscious. In a recent New York Review of Books essay about Beradt’s work, Zadie Smith observes that today, “no one need shout at us in a shrill voice through a megaphone” because “we keep the communication channel permanently open in our back pockets.” And so we allow those who control the algorithm to control our dreams.

Beradt fled Germany for New York in 1939. Guthrie, after being fired from a West Coast radio station for his left-wing politics, moved to the city the following year. In June 1943, determined to help beat fascism, Guthrie joined the Merchant Marine, surviving two torpedo attacks while serving meals and washing dishes on military supply ships. He often played and sang for his crewmates, and at one point persuaded at least a dozen of them to help build what he called the Woody Guthrie Anticyclone and Ship Speeder-Upper Aerodynamic Wind Machine out of scrap wood, string, rubber bands, and a discarded propeller. He knew how to keep the hoping machine running.

Today, Guthrie’s gift for clarity is more necessary than ever. Inside what Smith calls our “digitally modified slumber,” we’re all too easily persuaded to abandon our convictions. We need to not only make resolutions but carry them with us, expressed in the shortest, sharpest words we have: Eat good. Stay glad. Dance better. Wake up and fight.

If you’d like something specific to conservation to pair with today’s post, I highly recommend Greg Vandy’s book 26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs, which places Guthrie’s paeans to hydropower in historical and political context (without denying their oversights). If you’d like to read more about the art of saying a great deal in a short time, check out ’ essay about Bob Dylan’s notetaking habits. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year’s Eve.

It’s been a true pleasure to write Conservation Works this year, in large part because it’s put me in touch with more of you — people who care deeply about conservation and where it’s headed.

Whether you’ve been reading from the start or have joined me recently, thank you for your time, your thoughtful comments, and your excellent suggestions of Words We Need. Thanks especially to paid subscribers; all of my posts are entirely free, but paid subscriptions help make Conservation Works possible.

For conservation and conservationists, 2025 was a year of terrible headlines and some genuinely encouraging, mostly ignored successes. (This is almost always the case, but in 2025 the contrast was just about blinding.)

Public conservation institutions in the U.S. suffered cruel and nonsensical cuts by the Trump administration, leaving thousands of conservation practitioners out of work or demoralized or both.

Fundamental conservation laws faced death by a thousand clichés.

The basic conditions for effective conservation — democracy, economic security, competent leadership — end the year on shakier ground.

And yet communities everywhere are sticking up for those basic conditions, often drawing on histories of resistance.

Current and former public servants are defending their colleagues and safeguarding accumulated wisdom.

People from all over the political spectrum are speaking up for public lands and recognizing their common interest in conservation.

Young conservationists are still joining the movement …

… while conservationists of all ages continue to reinvent it.

Good books are still helping us imagine the future …

… and bad books are still (sometimes) worth talking about.

Meanwhile, the planet remains full of wondrous life, both despite us and because of us. And fortunately, it still has room for species that just can’t stand us. Here’s to another year of keeping it that way.

One of the great ironies of conservation is that humans already know how to do it. Human societies have practiced conservation at local and regional scales for millennia. The institutional conservation movement, now well over a century old, has successfully protected species and habitats worldwide. Solving the biodiversity crisis doesn’t necessarily require new technologies or knowledge; it does require the lessons of experience.

Many of those lessons are stored in the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Development Experience Clearinghouse, which contains more than 150,000 project evaluations, planning documents, and oral histories collected by USAID over its six decades of existence. When the Trump administration demolished the agency earlier this year, it blocked public access to the DEC, and the DEC home page has since been relegated to the Wayback Machine.

Only a small fraction of USAID projects were focused on conservation. Some, like the large dams and high-input agriculture the agency supported during its early decades, set conservation back. But there’s a fundamental similarity between the humanitarian projects undertaken by USAID and conservation efforts worldwide: all try to change human behavior for the common good. So the DEC is a rich source of conservation-relevant knowledge.

Even when the DEC was publicly available, though, its wisdom was difficult to access and act on. Lindsey Moore, a USAID staffer who worked in Bangladesh and the Caribbean before leaving the agency in 2021, writes that “the data eventually outweighed the people meant to absorb it.” Patterns of success and failure were buried within tens of millions of digital pages, and staff turnover and political shifts made even obvious lessons difficult to apply.

To address this problem, Moore founded DevelopMetrics, whose data and development analysts trained an open-source large language model on the evidence accumulated in the DEC. Unlike the Silicon Valley companies racing to produce artificial-intelligence models that imitate human conversation, DevelopMetrics has a narrower, clearly defined mission that seeks to support humans rather than supplant them. (Technology journalist Karen Hao, author of the must-read Empire of AI, points to these kinds of specialized AI models as useful alternatives to the overhyped and destructive search for artificial general intelligence.)

The DevelopMetrics model, Moore emphasizes, is not a crystal ball but a “tireless, methodical reader”; the patterns it identifies are those that human experts, given infinite time, could pick out themselves. In an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, she summarizes its initial findings:

• Bring delivery closer to households. “Programs perform best when decisions, follow-ups, and problem-solving happen where people actually live—the farm, the school, the clinic—and not in air-conditioned meeting rooms a hundred miles away,” Moore writes. As I wrote earlier this month, the job of persuasion is also best undertaken where people actually live, by people who understand their experiences. For large conservation nonprofits, bringing delivery closer to households might mean shifting more resources toward local efforts, whether those are local chapters or like-minded independent groups.

• Practice changes practice. “Behavior changes only when skills are practiced in the real world, reinforced by peers, and observed by someone who can say, ‘Try it again,’” Moore writes. For conservation practitioners, practice in the real world might mean prioritizing hands-on workshops over panels and lectures. In my area of Washington State, the Mountain Lion Foundation has taught homeowners to build lion-proof chicken coops, aiming to create local ambassadors for coexistence. The East Cascades Oak Partnership, meanwhile, hosts hands-on restoration workshops for landowners and other community members.

• Design for scale, not for pilots. “Lasting programs design for scale from day one. They name owners, secure budgets, and test the routines that will keep them running,” Moore writes. For nonprofit conservation groups, designing for scale might mean working more closely with the public agencies that fund conservation at local, state, and national levels, tapping multiple sources of support before a project gets off the ground.

• Co-creation beats consultation. “Projects last when the people who must run them share real power,” Moore writes, “defining the problem, the rules, and the responsibilities from the start.” For conservation practitioners, co-creation might mean finding common ground with people who come at conservation from different perspectives, and establishing ongoing working relationships with them. Earlier this year, the National Wolf Conversation gave me a glimpse of the possibilities of co-creation for conservation — when all affected parties have a substantive role in defining the problem, the solutions can be more innovative and effective than those devised by any single party.

• Strengthen the middle layer. “When the middle layer is supported, systems hold; when it isn’t, everything else is just theory.” Here, Moore is talking about the “teachers, nurses, agronomists, cooperative leaders, and others responsible for daily implementation” of development projects. For conservation practitioners, strengthening the middle layer might mean heading off burnout by making sure colleagues and employees have the resources necessary to do their jobs. Conservationists are highly susceptible to what librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” — the tendency to see one’s work as a sacred calling — and are likely to try to do too much with too little.

The DevelopMetrics analysis comes with caveats, of course, which Moore and colleagues describe in a recent peer-reviewed paper. For many conservation practitioners, the big-picture lessons above will be unsurprising, long since learned on the job. The DevelopMetrics findings, though, are drawn from more extensive and diverse experiences than any one person could have. Work like this can boost the confidence of new and veteran practitioners alike— and help build the political will that conservation everywhere so desperately needs.

Conservation At Work

• There really was some good news for conservation in 2025. For genuine accomplishments worth building on, check out these year-end roundups from the BBC, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, the World Wildlife Fund, and The Nature Conservancy. Top off the list with this relatively positive take on Cop30 by climate journalist Fiona Harvey and this major forest-protection news from Suriname.

• Several Hong Kong researchers and artists successfully crowdfunded an art exhibition and a series of citizen science surveys focused on the humble Hong Kong newt, which is often killed by vehicles. “By harnessing nature-inspired creativity and multiple art formats, it is possible to make a so-called non-charismatic species charismatic,” they report. Tribal leaders in the Pacific Northwest have given the Pacific lamprey a similar glow-up in recent years, leaning into its marvelous ugliness and telling the story of its long relationship with humans.

• Like birdwatching? These researchers suggest you try “joy-watching.”

• An analysis of the branding used by professional sports teams across 50 countries and 10 team sports found that one-quarter use wild animals in their team logos, names, or supporters’ nicknames. Lions, tigers, and gray wolves are the most popular choices of species, and mammals and birds are the most popular groups — but amphibians, cephalopods and insects show up too. The authors argue that “representations of wildlife in the sport industry offer enormous potential for shifting social norms, raising funds and promoting biodiversity conservation initiatives,” and have launched a campaign called The Wild League to make their case.

Finally, I’m happy to report that I’ll be spending part of 2026 writing a revised and expanded version of The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook. The new version, tentatively titled The Art and Science of Essay Writing, will be published by the University of Chicago Press and will address essay writing of all kinds. As part of the project, I’ll be interviewing a variety of essay writers about their craft — if there are writers you’d like to hear from, let me know!

Happy holidays, and see you in the new year.

Last month, , founder and CEO of Natives Outdoors and the author of , published an essay called “Environmentalism Is Out of Ideas” (subscribers only, but well worth the subscription). Like a lot of us, he’s despondent about the second Trump administration’s attacks on longstanding environmental laws — and about the inadequacy of the op-eds, petitions, and press releases that large environmental groups have issued in response. The U.S. environmental movement, he writes, has been “perfecting outdated strategies while the country’s environmental laws disintegrated.”

I agree that these strategies are outdated, and I agree with much of the rest of Dr. Len’s critique. Large environmental organizations “have, in many ways, come to resemble the very bureaucracies they were founded to confront,” making them cautious and slow to act. Some of the philanthropies that fund them suffer from the same sclerosis. Environmental activists at all levels, from local to global, can and should spend a lot more time connecting environmental health to human health and livelihoods, making it clear that the “fight for a livable planet is the fight to make ordinary life bearable again.”

Less doom, more possibility; less restraint, more restoration. Yes.

But is environmentalism out of ideas? Not exactly. The problem, as I see it, is narrower: some of the wealthiest environmental organizations in the U.S. are relying on Silent Spring persuasion tactics in a Braiding Sweetgrass world.

Let’s start by naming names.

As even this short list makes clear, “environmentalism” encompasses a wide range of strategies and interests. Two of the above groups are land trusts dedicated to protecting private land (The Nature Conservancy and The Conservation Fund). Two operate famous zoos as well as national and international conservation programs (the San Diego Wildlife Alliance and the Wildlife Conservation Society). Two are focused on bird conservation (Ducks Unlimited and the National Audubon Society). Generalizations about environmentalism and environmental groups are always risky.

What we can say is that all of these organizations, and not a few of their smaller counterparts, were shaped by the environmental politics of the 1960s and 1970s (the two youngest groups on the list, The Conservation Fund and Conservation International, were both founded by former leaders of The Nature Conservancy). In 1962, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought unprecedented public attention to the omnipresence — and, often, invisibility — of environmental threats. Over the following two decades, environmental advocates and their allies in Congress were able to pass more than a dozen major environmental laws, from headline-grabbers like the Endangered Species Act to the obscure but crucial Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which addresses hazardous waste.

Since that era, large environmental groups have employed teams of lawyers and lobbyists to defend these laws and, when possible, strengthen their enforcement. Considering the wealth, power and determination of their corporate opponents, they’ve been astonishingly successful. As the Trump administration mounts new attacks on these protections, we need this legal and political expertise more than ever.

What environmentalists don’t need, as Dr. Len points out, is another frantic email asking for a clearly inadequate response to a terrifying threat. Or, more precisely, they need more than that. They may well keep signing petitions and calling their Congresspeople, but every environmentalist of my acquaintance knows that’s no longer enough.

Silent Spring was, among other things, a fear appeal, and as such it worked brilliantly. Sixty years later, fear appeals can still turn out the faithful, but the faithful’s adrenal glands are exhausted, and potential supporters don’t want new reasons to worry. Neither group is apathetic, though. In fact, they’re eager to listen and act.

Consider the success of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which, since its publication in 2013, has become an international juggernaut with an almost alarmingly fervent following. Like Silent Spring, Braiding Sweetgrass is a remarkable work of art, but unlike Silent Spring, it’s not a fear appeal. Instead, it’s an invitation to connect with the living world nearby — to observe one’s place more closely and participate in its care and repair.

If Braiding Sweetgrass is any indication, tens of millions of people are longing to do more than wearily play defense for the environment. And that’s an enormous opportunity for mainstream environmental organizations.

To make the most of this opportunity, these organizations need to more fully delegate the job of persuasion. I’d like to see national organizations dedicate a larger fraction of their funding to local groups, whether those are existing local chapters or like-minded independent organizations. With expanded financial and technical support, members of these groups can more effectively use their place-specific knowhow, and credibility, to recruit new allies.

They can do this by, for example, pointing out the tangible and intangible benefits of a healthy local environment, from climate resilience to economic development to emotional well-being; by working with local and state officials on proactive laws and policies; by helping neighbors steward and restore their place. And when a bedrock national law is at risk and calls to Congress are needed, they can remind their supporters to pick up the phone.

This kind of work is already happening, but we need more of it. In recent years, deep internal conflicts have disrupted the work of the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society. The tensions are complex, but they tend to pit leaders who want to defend the organizational “brand” against staff and volunteers who want to work on a greater variety of issues and employ a greater variety of strategies (and, in Audubon’s case, change the organization’s name). The irony is that in plenty of places, including the red county where I live, most national environmental organizations’ brands are frankly toxic — even as their basic concerns are widely shared. Diluting their brands by lending more support to local groups could well be a strategic move.

Dr. Len suggests that the environmental movement take a cue from Lockheed Martin, which during World War II ordered a select group of its engineers to design the fastest jet fighter in the world. Sequestered under a rented circus tent and freed from bureaucratic restrictions, the group accomplished its mission in less than five months. He suggests that large environmental organizations and the foundations that support them use a similar approach to make “the environment” one of the top five reasons Americans cite for voting in 2028.

With respect, I’m wary of both strategy and goal here. Public engagement in environmental issues is not an engineering problem, and it doesn’t lend itself to engineering solutions. It doesn’t need a faster jet fighter; it needs the likes of Robin Wall Kimmerer and the conversations and alliances that her work can spark. And I don’t think it’s possible, or even desirable, for an abstraction like “the environment” to top the list of concerns for today’s voters. I’d rather see environmental organizations of all kinds drive home the relationship between environmental issues and the concerns voters are already talking about — health, safety, affordability. Doing that persuasively means supporting savvy local advocates and freeing them to talk so their neighbors will listen. It means raising not just one tent, but as many as the job requires.

Conservation at Work

• One year after the removal of four hydroelectric dams from the Klamath River, there are “salmon everywhere” in the Klamath Basin, reports the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. of Earth Hope shared the good news, and my friend Emma Marris reflected on its significance in this guest essay for the New York Times.

• I’m proud to have helped birth an extensive ProPublica and High Country News investigation of the public-lands grazing system. Among other findings, it shows that the system’s benefits flow disproportionately to the very rich. Read part one here, and look for parts two and three this week. Or subscribe to the print version of High Country News and read the whole thing now!

• Speaking of the strategies employed by large conservation groups, a study in Conservation Biology examines the assumptions identified by employees of The Nature Conservancy at strategic planning workshops in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While conservation practitioners readily question what is being done, the authors write, and engage in “deep reflection on the ethics and operating principles of the conservation community” — the why of their work — they are less likely to critically evaluate how their work is being carried out.

• A new paper in People and Nature analyzes the arguments used by British opponents of the plume trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, finding that while some appealed to existing values, others advocated a new worldview, suggesting that people appreciate birds’ right to live in the wild and cultivate more meaningful relationships with them through birdwatching. (In a sense, they anticipated Braiding Sweetgrass.) As the study’s author concludes, “conservation should not be viewed as a linear story of continuous improvement or refinement of ideas but rather a cyclical process, with the same arguments reappearing in new contexts.”

Finally, please enjoy this essay by Zen teacher Susan Roshi on the power of haiku in a changing world. “The love at large in haiku is too natural, implicit, and bone-deep to surface in sentimentality,” she writes, “and so intimately felt that it can’t separate feeling with the Earth from feeling about it.”

   Deep autumn—

my neighbor,

    how does he live, I wonder?

                                                  Bashō

The new Kathryn Bigelow thriller “A House of Dynamite” takes place as an unidentified nuclear missile arcs toward the midwestern United States. It’s terrifying to watch, and even more terrifying to imagine the real-life version: What if, instead of these apparently well-intentioned characters, the people in charge of the response were the members of the current administration?

The movie’s military leaders, elected officials, and civil servants are humans with human problems. On the morning of the missile attack, one has lost sleep caring for a sick child, one has been sidelined by a colonoscopy, and several are distracted, to varying degrees, by personal crises. But they are all thoughtful people, and many are highly trained to respond to the situation they face. Together, they represent a pretty good version of one of the very worst-case scenarios. And even so — spoiler alert — things don’t end well.

“A House of Dynamite” is a big-budget reminder of the nuclear threat, but it’s also what my friend calls “a primal scream for competence.” Those elected or appointed to lead had better have a clue, Bigelow warns, because when the worst happens, even the qualified can only do so much.

2025 has been a bad year for competence. In the U.S., the appointments of ludicrously unprepared dingbats to high political office have been followed by months of layoffs and funding cuts within the federal workforce. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversaw conservation as well as health and education programs, was abruptly dismantled, forcing its staff to abandon urgent projects. Thousands of staffers have been fired or resigned from the U.S. Park Service, Forest Service, and other land and water agencies, leaving those institutions short of the people and knowledge needed to fight wildfires, keep the air and water clean, and steward our shared landscapes.

American skepticism of “experts” has a long history, and there are some good reasons for it: people with specialized knowledge can sometimes start to see themselves as authorities on everything, or forget that they, too, are fallible humans who must be held accountable by others. But in recent years, this skepticism has been exploited to the point that many voters and elected officials dismiss not only so-called experts but anyone who confesses to competence.

Part of the problem is that while the number of people condemned for expertise has multiplied, the definition of an expert has been successfully narrowed, and caricatured, so that it describes someone with a lot of formal education and not much meaningful experience. But “expert,” in its original sense, simply meant someone with experience, or practice, or skill. Someone, in other words, who had acquired competence.

Over the last generation or so, many in the conservation establishment have slowly returned to this broader definition, recognizing that conservation experts should include not only people with university-certified knowledge but those thoroughly familiar with one place, or one population of plants or animals, or one set of human traditions. They should also include those skilled at knitting different kinds of knowledge together, or spotting emerging difficulties. This recognition, while overdue, is advancing conservation in ways that benefit everyone.

When its original meaning is restored, expertise isn’t so easy to demonize or dismiss. Everyone is, or can be, an expert at something, and can apply their particular expertise where it’s needed most. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for instance, can help me style my hair, and someone with more relevant experience can replace him on that Zoom call.

Conservation at Work

• My friend Hillary Rosner’s terrific new book Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World is out! Read an excerpt in BioGraphic and an interview with Hillary in RE:PUBLIC.

• The British Ecological Society and National Trust have called for an ecosystem approach to conservation in the United Kingdom, making the case that it “provides the framing for the development of the whole-of-society strategy needed to tackle the environmental crises we are in.”

• On a similar note, three University of Montana researchers argue in The Conversation that conservation policy should strive not only to prevent extinctions but allow species to “truly thrive,” recovering their ecological roles, their geographic ranges and their relationships with people.

• A new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment outlines the rewards of arts-conservation collaborations, appropriately illustrating its point with a charming cartoon.

• During a week of elections and post-elections discussion in the U.S., I appreciated this tribute to place-based organizing and this appearance by Barbara Kingsolver, which was full of wisdom about the rural-urban divides that plague the country — and conservation.

Thanks to for recommending this Word We Need.

This week, two seasonal phenomena returned to my neighborhood. The Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon got their first significant snowfall; in response, Jason Lemieux, the manager of the nearby Nordic ski area, restarted his charming predawn Instagram reports on local snow conditions. “Come get it while you can,” he advised after grooming trails this morning. “Temperatures look to be warming up tonight!”

Once snowflakes fall to the ground, they begin a slow process of deformation, rounding off their sharp edges and forming bonds with neighboring flakes. This sintering, as it’s called, creates the dense lattice of crystals that supports Jason’s groomer as he further compacts the snow into slippery trails.

For Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a lifelong skier and the author of Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, sintering provides both the literal foundation of her winters and a metaphor for making change. Several years ago, she volunteered to help groom the trail along Jackson Creek in Peterborough, Ontario, where she skis daily. “I discovered that nearly every day the snow was slightly different,” she writes.

Simpson became fascinated by sintering, and by the idea that “the first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbors.” She observed that these “coalitions” of flakes allowed the packed snow on the trail to linger long after rising temperatures melted the snow around it. She writes:

My ancestors were very good at sintering … at living in a way that bonded them to the different forms of life with whom they were sharing time and space. They were building not a Nishnaabeg world, but a Nishnaabeg coalition, working with plant life, animal life and all the other planetary forces that existed before humans. They sintered and wove themselves into the existing fabric of life, working in concert with the planet to renew themselves.

Sintering is the process of gaining strength through forming bonds, of adapting to one’s neighbors without changing one’s essential shape. Like a sintered snowpack, a sintered coalition of humans can endure far longer than any of its individual components could survive alone. In a sintered coalition of humans and other species, I imagine, there would be constant adaptation and accommodation, but no single species could drive the others to extinction.

Sinter while you can; temperatures look to be warming up tonight.

Conservation at Work

• Speaking of forming coalitions, I appreciated this call to “look out not only for neighbors we like but for neighbors we like least,” and this thoughtful investigation of the ever-shifting relationships generically labeled as “community.”

• The plains bison, that icon of Western North America, used to roam freely east of the Mississippi, too, and might one day again.

• Caribou within the territory of the West Moberly First Nations, in northeastern British Columbia, were declared extirpated by the provincial and Canadian governments more than a decade ago and, as a result, have not been regularly monitored since. Earlier this year, however, a study that combined Indigenous knowledge with remote camera trapping identified 40 individual caribou — the highest count reported since the start of the century. The study’s authors quote West Moberly elder Max Desjarlais: “Walk the land before you talk about the land.”

• Riding the land is the focus of another new study, which conducted in-depth interviews with several “range riders” — people hired by ranchers to deter wolves or grizzly bears from livestock by riding near herds, on horse or ATV. The practice of range riding, the authors conclude, can not only protect both livestock and predators but “play a central role in building trust — between environmentalists, agencies, and resource users.” They caution, however, that range-riding programs need long-term economic support.

Finally, Kerry Clare of recently shared this striking postcard from A Lake Story, a canoe procession that celebrated two decades of hard-won conservation progress on Toronto’s Don River. Enjoy.

Earlier this month, I visited Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I talked about my book Beloved Beasts and the past and future of conservation. Eckerd is known for its programs in marine biology and environmental studies, and it was a joy to meet so many students engaged in the problems of conservation. It was also a fateful day; between my morning and evening talks, Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah, and when I returned to the podium the questions from students felt even more urgent — to me and, I imagine, to them as well.

Many asked what they should, or could, do now. They weren’t necessarily asking for career advice, though many expected to have careers in conservation. They wanted to know how they could help stop or reverse the environmental losses they’d already witnessed. I gave a few different versions of my standard answer, which is to start doing something you know to be useful and find others to do it with. In the days since, I’ve been thinking more about what’s worked for me, and what I’ve seen work for others, as we’ve tried to further conservation. What follows is for the students I met at Eckerd, and for any conservationist wondering what to do next.

Start in your place. This is especially important, I think, if you’ve learned a lot of conservation theory but haven’t had a chance to put it into practice. No matter where you live, figuring out how to do conservation in your neighborhood will teach you a lot about the complexities of conservation in general, and you’ll be able to apply those lessons at a larger scale, in another place, or right where you are. Working locally and at a small scale is also likely to yield visible results, which can keep you going when you’re getting started and are most impatient for change.

Find out who knows what, who’s doing what, and who needs what. Even if you live in the middle of a city, you’re surrounded by other species’ habitats — and by people who know those habitats well and are working to protect, steward, and restore them. (If you can’t imagine that animals really depend on your place, or that anyone else cares about it, read A Natural History of Empty Lots.) Ask questions: who lived in this place first, human and non-human, and who lives here now? How has it changed, and how is it changing? Who depends on it, who enjoys it, who governs it, and who or what threatens its inhabitants? Who’s working on its behalf, and what do they need that you can provide? You might be needed to join a protest, plant seedlings, or write a grant proposal. Whatever’s needed will likely lead you to the next useful thing, and to more people to do it with.

Look for people working across divisions. Conservation is necessarily about blocking harm, but moving conservation forward requires bridging and building, too — finding points of agreement among people who vote differently or live differently and trying to expand that common ground. This kind of work is usually happening offline, far from the headlines: the board members of my local soil and water conservation district, for instance, almost certainly didn’t vote for the same candidate in the last presidential election, but every month they get together to discuss the habitat restoration projects the district supports. At a time when real dialogue is so often silenced by yelling or insults or worse, such collegial, purposeful discussions are not only refreshingly effective but just about the cheapest therapy you can find.

Resist the pleasures of doom. Doom is so tempting! And there are times when it seems very close at hand. I remind myself that none of us knows the end of our collective story. Plenty of conservationists worked through times of crisis — the world wars, the Dust Bowl, any number of plagues — that, to them, must have seemed like the end of the world. They may not have been optimistic during those times, but they believed they could still make things better, and many of them did. We can do the same.

Don’t wait on hope. While maintaining some faith in the future and your fellow humans is important, I find hope to be an unreliable motivator. I lose hope a dozen times a day! (Usually momentarily, but still.) Determination, love, and a sense of obligation — to place, people, or both — seem to sustain conservationists over the long run. And conservation is almost always a long run. When my own determination falters, I often return to a line that Aldo Leopold, in an unusually dark mood, wrote to a friend: “That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.” No matter how we see the odds, the living world deserves no less.

Conservation at Work

• I had the bittersweet pleasure of staying up late on Wednesday night to think about Jane Goodall for The Atlantic (gift link). She was a moral compass for conservation worldwide, and a wise, gentle, wonderfully irreverent voice for all that really matters.

• A new article in Bioscience argues for a “guardians and gardeners” approach to the U.S. landscapes legally designated as wilderness. For more on the ever-evolving idea of wilderness, check out “Untrammeled,” a terrific High Country News story by Marissa Ortega-Welch, and Marissa’s equally terrific podcast How Wild.

• The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission has specialist groups for flamingos, crustaceans, eels, wild tulips, and dozens of other species assemblages; last month, it finally established a specialist group for microbial communities, whose disruption is both a cause and effect of climate change. Kent Redford, reliably one of the most interesting thinkers in conservation, proposed in a 2023 editorial in Conservation Biology that the IUCN “build interest and capacity in microbes” as part of its species and ecosystem work.

• “Between Moon Tides,” a short documentary from the Guardian, follows conservationist Deirdre Robinson and her team as they struggle to save saltmarsh sparrow chicks from rising sea levels. An excellent example of what to do now.

• Thanks to Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay, for so clearly articulating the mission of journalism in general and conservation journalism in particular. “Journalism is a catalyst, not a cure,” he writes. “It nudges complex systems by making facts hard to ignore and lies expensive to maintain.”

Finally, have you heard about “The Great Moose Migration,” a livestream available on Swedish TV? A new paper finds that the immersive, real-time footage fosters “emotional connectedness and ecological curiosity” and may be especially valuable to those with limited access to nature. 🫎

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has spent the last few months up to no good — demolishing the agencies he oversees, supporting the sale of public lands, trying to rename Denali and the Gulf of Mexico, and attempting to whitewash history at the national parks. Last April, he committed a lesser but still pernicious sin. “The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave,” he posted.

The first problem here is unoriginality. Critics of the Endangered Species Act have been comparing the law to Hotel California since at least 2012, when conservative attorney William Perry Pendley invoked the Eagles song in an op-ed for the Washington Times. (Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during the first Trump administration, has also compared climate change to unicorns because “neither exist.”)

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that back in 1973, when Congress passed the current version of the Endangered Species Act, the four opponents of the bill — yep, there were only four, and they were all House Republicans — hummed the song as they cast their votes.*

The second problem is that the comparison doesn’t make sense. I’m a Gen Xer, and my Boomer elders have made me listen to “Hotel California” at least, oh, one billion times. I can say with some authority that the Hotel California is a lovely place whose guests are having way too much fun. While I wish this were the case for endangered species, I’m afraid overindulgence is not their main trouble.

The third and most serious problem is that Burgum identifies a real issue with the Endangered Species Act but proposes a counterproductive “solution” — a habit he shares with his boss and fellow political appointees. (Should we make America healthy again? Well, yes, but FFS not like this.) In his post, Burgum noted that “97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there” and that “we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions.”

Well, yes! Fewer than 80 of the more than 2,000 species protected by the Endangered Species Act have recovered to the point that they could be removed from its list of species. Conservationists do celebrate additions to the list, which is understandable given the long legal battles often involved but always strikes me as a bit sad — a little like celebrating when a loved one enters the emergency room.

Conservation scientists have offered explanations for the law’s failures for decades, but the overarching reason is that restoring an endangered species to health is an uncertain and costly task. “We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them under the Endangered Species Act,” the ecologist David Wilcove told Inside Climate News last month, “and in doing that, we are more or less ensuring that it’s going to be very difficult to recover them and get them off the list.”

To address this problem, the U.S., as a society, needs to better protect species before they become endangered, protecting and restoring habitats on federal, state, tribal and private land and investing in the state agencies and tribal nations that are responsible for conserving most of the country’s wildlife (and plenty of its plants, too). Conservation institutions at all levels of government should be equipped with the experience and authority needed to protect species and habitats from complex and increasing threats.

Unfortunately, Burgum didn’t propose anything like this in his April post. Up ahead in the distance, he saw a shimmering light.

“Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation — not regulation — that has spawned American greatness,” he wrote. “The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”

As I’ve previously written, de-extinction is not a thing. It’s a marketing term for the creation of designer organisms that share some characteristics with extinct species. While the technologies it employs might, one day, be of limited use in ecosystem restoration, they are not and will never be a bedrock for modern species conservation, which is fundamentally about protecting existing species and their habitats in relationship with one another.

Burgum, though, isn’t listening. He’s Tiffany-twisted, dancing to forget with his so-called friends. Meanwhile, endangered species — and all species, ours included — are stuck with reality, and doing our best to survive.

* Commenter Eric makes the excellent point that the song wasn’t released until 1976. Small mercies!

Conservation at Work

• Speaking of Doug Burgum, don’t be deceived by his recent move to “strengthen outdoor access and recreation.” His September 4 secretarial order imposes new restrictions and oversight on the Land and Water Conservation Fund, one of the most successful and popular federal conservation programs. For an excellent LWCF explainer, see this new piece at High Country News from Jonathan Thompson of .

• Over at , law professor Sam Bagenstos tallies the damage already done to U.S. institutions by the Trump administration and warns that rebuilding the civil service will be an enormous task. Among those already on the job are Jacob Malcom of Next Interior, who pops up in the comments, and former USAID leaders Monica Bansal and Hadas Kushnir, whose One Earth Partners will be hosting and co-hosting events at Climate Week later this month.

• “Ecology is always political and embedded in power relations, and accepting this fact does not invalidate or compromise ecological research. In fact, it can greatly enrich ecological research.” In Nature Reviews Biodiversity, Bram Büscher and several other political ecologists discuss their field’s importance to biodiversity conservation.

• Conservationists are finding more and more clever applications for machine learning and other types of narrow AI, from sorting camera-trap photos to tracking down these massive but well-hidden invasive black wattle trees in Australia. If the tech industry weren’t so preoccupied with creating “everything machines” with catastrophic environmental and social costs, it might be able to do some good for the planet.

• Warm welcomes to two new conservation Substackers: Dr. Stephanie Buckley of the Conservation Social Science Digest and Chris Allieri of . Chris is also the founder and executive director of the NYC Plover Project, whose staff and volunteers work to protect piping plover and other shorebird nesting habitat on city beaches.

• In a new article for Bioscience, primate ecologist Nathaniel Dominy and colleagues note that while all apes forage for fallen, often fermented fruit, there’s no widely accepted word for this practice. They propose “scrumping,” a British term for apple scavenging (that carries a less wholesome connotation on this side of the Atlantic). A fun article with references to Oscar Wilde, Gary Larson, medieval bestiaries, and the social rewards that apes may enjoy while swilling rotten fruit.

Finally, enjoy these poetry prompts for biologists (or anyone, really) from Marjorie Wonham and Curtis Wasson.

For conservation practitioners, the boundary between domesticated and non-domesticated plants and animals has long served as a job description of sorts: their responsibilities lie firmly with the non-domesticated. The boundary in question, though, is so muddy and unsteady that it might be better described as a … swamp. “Domestication is not a clean-cut concept, and the word is difficult to define,” the anthropologist Charles Reed wrote in 1977. “I have become lost in this semantic bog before, and so avoid the morass now.”

Earlier this year, a team of archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and others bravely waded into Reed’s semantic bog, using a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B to propose “a domestication concept that is applicable across the sciences, unbound by preconceived ideas or researcher biases.”

After sorting through nearly fifty scholarly definitions (and several decades of academic disputes ranging from the petty to the politically consequential), the authors concluded that domesticated traits don’t have to benefit the domesticator or the domesticated, and they don’t have to be created on purpose. They do, however, have to be heritable, observable across a population, and the result of interactions with humans.

The authors acknowledged that under this expansive definition, “organisms as widely differing as weeds in your garden, birds at your bird feeder, your pet cat, and even yourself fall under the umbrella of domesticated.” So might coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, dolphins, manatees, wild boars, and even the leopards who live on the northern edge of Mumbai, where they hunt feral dogs. While the definitional debate will surely continue, the direction of the trend is clear: "In the not-too-distant future,” the authors wrote, “most of the life on Earth will be domesticated.”

What does this mean for conservation? The human ability to domesticate other species has enabled us to survive in nearly every habitat on Earth, and some have argued that conservationists should embrace this superpower. “Our challenge is to understand and thoughtfully manage the tradeoffs among ecosystem services that result from the inescapable domestication of nature,” Peter Kareiva and colleagues wrote in Science in 2007.

And yet our powers of domestication have their limits. Consider the zebra: despite its resemblance to a horse, no one has reliably tamed a zebra, much less domesticated the species. Unlike horses, zebras don’t have strong family bonds that would-be domesticators can exploit, and they rarely hesitate to kick and bite their way to freedom. Even Lord Walter Rothschild, who in the 1890s somehow managed to persuade three zebras to pull his carriage through the streets of London, never attempted to ride one.

We may be domesticating the planet, but it still has room for species that just can’t stand us. Conservationists should make sure it stays that way.

Conservation at Work

• “Rewilding” is now an official strategy of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, thanks to a new state law. This sounds like progress! But rewilding — which aims to restore the independent functioning of ecological processes, essentially reversing domestication on a landscape scale — means different things to different people, and the law’s vague language leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding and fearmongering. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, recognizing that misuse of the concept “risks alienating communities, harming existing biodiversity, and undermining confidence in a technique with enormous conservation potential,” has developed ten principles to guide rewilding initiatives, but these aren’t incorporated into the law.

• Primatologist Tracie McKinney argues that it’s time to update the language of human-wildlife interactions: words like “invasion,” “raid,” and “attack,” she writes in Mongabay, assign malevolent human motivations to nonhuman beings, and should be replaced with more neutral terms like “displacement", “foraging,” and “encounter.” For more on the language used to address issues between humans and wildlife, see “Working Across the Urban-Rural Divide,” a guide from the Western Landowners Alliance.

• Speaking of the urban-rural divide, environmental policy scholar Kayla Gabehart, who has studied the responses of urban and rural Coloradans to wolf reintroduction and other statewide policies, describes the “spatial patriarchy” that fuels rural grievance in an essay for The Conversation.

• Good news for sharks: the program ReShark is using surplus eggs from public aquariums to breed leopard sharks in captivity and release them in the protected waters around the Indonesian archipelago of Raja Ampat. And in Boston Harbor, cleaner water and decreased fishing pressure are allowing sand tiger shark numbers to slowly increase. (Listen to the latter story for a description of “tonic immobility,” an appropriate response to current events.)

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  Finally, HEATED has a heartening profile of Bentley Hensel, the backpacker who managed to draw TikTok’s attention to the Trump administration’s Arctic drilling push. Conservation can cut through.

If you work in conservation in any capacity, chances are that you follow the advice of Joanna Macy — even if you’ve never heard her name.

Macy, a scholar, activist, and teacher who died last month at the age of 96, was best known for “The Work That Reconnects,” a practice she developed in the 1980s in response to her own deep distress about environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear war. Long before climate anxiety and eco-anxiety became familiar terms, Macy began teaching her practice in workshops around the world, helping thousands move through their grief for life on earth and return to action.

Macy described the Work That Reconnects as a cycle of four stages: gratitude for the living world, acknowledgment of the pain one feels about its suffering, fresh recognition of one’s connections with all life, and “going forth” again to work on its behalf.

Macy named and formalized a practice that many conservationists discover through trial and error. Those who devote themselves to protecting other forms of life often respond to early defeats by denying their pain or retreating into cynicism. With or without Macy’s guidance, those who persist usually learn to grapple with their grief, recognize it as the cost of connection, and get back to work, repeating the process as needed. Macy’s great service to all of us who care about conservation was to provide directions through the darkness.

Earlier this year, one of my oldest and dearest friends died suddenly while running near his home in Vermont. The personal loss was profound, as was the loss to what Macy might call the whole. Nathan had a genius for connecting with people and connecting them to one another, and over the course of his life he tended a flourishing ecosystem of family and friends. In the weeks after his death, his absence felt like the cruelest of clearcuts, and sometimes it seemed that all of us who knew him could only stare at the pointless destruction.

On a humid Saturday morning last month, three hundred people gathered for his memorial service on the grounds of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The grief was palpable, but so was the affection among everyone present, friends and family and strangers alike. Nathan, I realized, had cared for a community strong enough to survive him. The forest would never be the same, and its recovery would be neither easy nor quick, but it — we — would go forth. We would keep moving, in and out of the darkness; we would repair old ties and nurture new ones. We would continue Nathan’s work along with our own.

Conservation at Work

• For those interested in learning more about Joanna Macy’s life and work, I recommend her many books (Active Hope is a good one to start with) and this series of conversations with her student Jess Serrante.

• Public servants affected by the Trump administration’s chainsawing of the federal workforce may be eligible for new fellowships at Harvard and Georgetown universities; master’s degree tuition discounts at George Washington and Georgetown universities; and fellowships and grants from nonprofits including Democracy Forward and Next Interior. FedSupport, launched in March by the Partnership for Public Service, offers resources for current and former federal employees.

• Critics of “de-extinction” have accused the company Colossal Biosciences of taking part in online smear campaigns against them. Colossal, which claims to have “de-extincted” dire wolves, denies any involvement, but it has taken what Nature calls “an increasingly combative tone in addressing criticisms.” Meanwhile, Colossal has announced an effort to “revive” the moa of New Zealand, which was driven extinct in the 1400s. As with all so-called de-extinction projects, this one won’t revive anything, but will attempt to create hybrid organisms using edited genetic material from close living relatives of the extinct species.

• Two new (and paywall-free) articles worth reading from BioScience: one on the benefits of iNaturalist for biodiversity research and “Toward a more effective funding model for conservation,” a call to reallocate conservation funding toward neglected species, including those we know little or nothing about.

• It was a pleasure to serve as a subject matter expert for “Why Are Buffalo Returning to Texas After 136 Years?” a short PBS Terra documentary about Lucille Contreras, founder of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. The film opens the second season of Women of the Earth, a series about the work of female land stewards across the United States. Enjoy this story of reconnection and going forth (and please help protect public media).

• My neighbor Sue Kusch of For the Love of Nature has written a two-part account of her experience with the Burdoin Fire, which in late July prompted widespread evacuations in our corner of Klickitat County, Washington, and ultimately destroyed 19 homes. As Sue emphasizes, all of us here are tremendously indebted to the federal, state, and local fire crews who kept the fire from doing more damage — even as layoffs and other Trump administration disruptions have forced federal firefighters to face the season with thousands missing from their ranks.

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  Finally, treat yourself to 12 lovely and unusual words for the natural world. 🌱

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In January, I was one of 25 participants in an event called the National Wolf Conversation, which took place over three days in Tucson, Arizona. Convened by Constructive Conflict, an independent consultancy hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the conversation was originally intended to involve several extended meetings over 18 months, but funding cuts put a stop—a temporary stop, at least—to the process almost before it started.

The three days we got, however, were remarkable. I’ve written about them here and here, and now you can hear directly from each participant in these short before-and-after interviews recorded by filmmaker Jared Callahan. The participants were chosen by Constructive Conflict to represent a wide range of experiences with and positions on the recovery of wolves in the U.S., so everyone who came to Tucson knew they would have fundamental differences with at least some of the other participants. Many of them, as you’ll see in the interviews, were skeptical at the start; they’d sat down with adversaries before, and come away feeling like they’d wasted their time.

I was skeptical, too. Over the years, I’ve observed plenty of roundtables, dialogues, and councils intended to resolve deep-seated disputes over wildlife, and only rarely have I seen them produce anything but frustration.

The National Wolf Conversation was different, though. I’m still trying to figure out exactly why, but one important difference was that we got to know one another as people before we even started talking about wolves: We were asked not to share our last names or professions, or to reveal our positions on wolf recovery, until we had spent most of a day together. By the time we fully introduced ourselves, we’d established enough goodwill that our differences, though deep as ever, generated more curiosity than antagonism. During the rest of our time in Tucson, I saw that curiosity serve us again and again, drawing us together instead of driving us apart.

Another difference was that the conveners didn’t hold us to a fixed agenda. Specialists in conflict transformation, they observed the group closely and responded to what they saw, nudging us toward difficult issues and then, as tensions arose, introducing a question or an exercise designed to remind us of what we had in common. Some of their interventions were so subtle that only in retrospect did I realize they had intervened at all.

Finally, the participants in the National Wolf Conversation weren’t seeking consensus, or compromise. We certainly weren’t trying to craft new policies, not in three short days. What we were doing, as I think you’ll see in the videos, was shifting and expanding our own perspectives.

If we came in thinking that all environmentalists hated ranchers, or that all ranchers were rich guys who had it out for wildlife, or that the idea of wolves themselves having a voice in the conversation was ridiculous, or that conflicts between livestock producers and wolves could be easily solved with better fences or fiercer guard dogs or more vegetarianism, we were thinking again. We were being reminded of the realities behind every stereotype, and recognizing the costs of polarized conflict to all involved, wolves included. We were forming the kind of relationships that could, eventually, lead to lasting solutions.

These might sound like platitudes, and maybe they are, but the conversation in Tucson was anything but. It was complicated, fascinating, frustrating, sometimes hilarious, and immensely rewarding. I hope it will continue.

Conservation at Work

• Earlier this year, I wrote about the many meanings of “coexistence”; in this insightful Undark essay, wildlife biologist Ashraf Shaikh warns that the term can be “used to justify state apathy, erase community suffering, and treat cultural endurance as a substitute for institutional support.” Just coexistence is possible, he writes, but the concept “must be reclaimed, not romanticized.”

• Recent Republican proposals to sell large chunks of U.S. public land have been beaten back, thanks in part to bipartisan public opposition, but supporters of public lands must keep arguing for their protection. This article from the Regulatory Review focuses on the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—which was developed by the Bureau of Land Management under the Biden administration and is now very likely to die a premature death—but it makes a persuasive general case for conservation as a valuable “use” of public lands.

• Speaking of public lands, check out Next Interior Memos, the newsletter of the new group Next Interior. Founded by Jacob Malcom, who directed the Office of Policy Management at Interior before resigning in protest earlier this year, Next Interior aims to expand public support for the department’s mission—and its current, former, and future employees.

• One encouraging indicator of that support: the Trump administration’s request that national park visitors report “negative” portrayals of U.S. history by the National Park Service has instead triggered an avalanche of scathing (and darkly funny) comments about the administration itself. “I’ve noticed that they’re aren’t nearly enough signs about how a tyrannical government is trying to whitewash history,” one park visitor wrote. To learn more about the history of history in the national parks, check out “Protecting History in the Parks,” a recent essay from Adam Sowards of Taking Bearings.

• This Farm Aid webinar on rural mental health is a powerful reminder that conservation depends on the wellbeing of those who live closest to the land.

• My essay “Saving Graces,” published in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, features three books about saving things—from species and habitats to specimens, traditions, and personal treasures. Readers of Conservation Works may be especially interested in What to Save and Why by philosophy professor Erich Hatala Matthes, a pithy and practical examination of the big questions common to all kinds of conservation.

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  Finally, this short film, which maps the path taken by a whooping-crane family on its migration from Texas to Alberta in spring of 2022, is worth six minutes of your time. Extraordinary conservation efforts have so far protected whoopers from extinction, but their migratory paths are narrowing and filled with threats; it’s both exhilarating and sobering to get a glimpse of the journey from their perspective.

Nature writing, as a genre, often leaves me cold, but I’ve long appreciated the work of Robert Macfarlane, who thinks deeply about not only landscapes but the language we use to describe them. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane seeks words for a concept that many modern minds find almost impossible to grasp: that a river is not simply water running downhill but, as he writes, “alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains.”

The trouble begins, or ends, with the English language itself. With a nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for a “grammar of animacy,” Macfarlane observes that English speakers typically “it” rivers, trees, mountains, and animals, “a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human persons.” He continues:

In English, we speak of a river in the singular. But “river” is one of the great group nouns, containing multitudes. In English, there is no verb “to river.” But what could be more of a verb than a river?

As Macfarlane notes, “grammar” also meant “magic” in Middle English, and a “gramarye” was a book of spells. “A good grammar of animacy,” he maintains, “can still re-enchant existence.”

Macfarlane’s exploration of river animacy takes him from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the tributaries of the Bay of Bengal to the Magpie River of Québec, known to the Innu people as the Mutuhekau Shipu. Each “rivering” and its telling carries him, and his readers, deeper into the old idea of rivers as living beings and the new idea that such beings can be protected with legal rights.

Last week, I saw Macfarlane speak in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s Books, the region’s secular shrine to language and its possibilities. Recalling Barry Lopez’s notion of the “syntax of the river,” he reflected:

Knowing the names of things is the first step. That’s the lexis, that’s the vocabulary. But the hard bit, and the bit that really matters, is knowing the relations between things, and that’s the syntax — that’s the syntax of the river. So we may have remembered the lexis of the river, but broadly we’ve forgotten the syntax.

I drove home from Portland along the Columbia River, upstream with the spring chinook. The Columbia has been subjected to what Macfarlane calls the “resource model” since Lewis and Clark first sighted her in 1805; dams for hydropower and agriculture have depleted her salmon, who now struggle to survive the summer heat. The most recent attempt to repair her cultural and ecological syntax has just been quashed by the Trump administration.

Wounded though she is, the Columbia still rivers. She still reaches the sea, still feeds those who depend on her, still casts spells from her gramarye. As I sped east on the interstate, under a sky hung with wildfire smoke, I imagined her waiting for us to remember, waiting for us to catch up.

Conservation at Work

• Republicans in the U.S. Congress just won’t quit trying to sell off our public lands. While the House amendment to the Republican budget package, proposed in May, would have made some 500,000 acres of public land available for sale, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has now drafted a proposal that conservation advocates say would allow the sale of more than *250 million* acres of public land. The Wilderness Society promptly published a detailed map of the places at risk — find the spots you love and start making a racket.

• Wildlife professionals usually prefer science to politics, but the members of The Wildlife Society have stepped forward to oppose the Trump administration’s proposal to radically narrow the definition of “harm” in the Endangered Species Act. The comments, submitted by 13 chapters and a group of past TWS presidents as well as TWS as a whole, are profoundly well-informed and worth reading.

• I applauded the recent call by Marco Malavasi, in Bioscience, to go “beyond crisis and grief” [paywalled, sorry, but worth tracking down] in conservation narratives. “Given the urgency of the current situation,” he writes, “it is essential to emphasize transformative change as the guiding narrative — reframing conservation science as a transformative discipline.”

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  Finally, congratulations to , whose *print* magazine Southlands launches this fall. To learn more about the magazine’s mission, and to support great reporting and writing about a region too often ignored, pay Boyce and his team a visit.