It died on a voluntary basis, in installments, over about ten months.

In the closing weeks of 2024 and the first weeks of 2025, the six largest banks in the United States — Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase — walked out, one after another, in a tidy procession, each departure making the next one cheaper. In February, Wells Fargo went further than leaving: it scrapped its own targets, the 2030 interim goal and the 2050 net-zero goal both. By late August the alliance had suspended operations; by early October it had voted to dissolve itself into a set of non-binding suggestions, which is to say into nothing. And the whole time the banks kept lending. In 2024 alone, the sixty-odd largest banks on earth put roughly $869 billion into fossil fuels — a three-year high — while the institutions among them that were quitting the alliance issued statements insisting they remained, of course, committed to their climate goals.

Notice what did not happen. No one resigned in protest. No one was fired. There was no scandal and no leak, because there was no secret — every decision was announced in the ordinary register of corporate prudence. The lawyers had flagged the exposure. Attorneys general in two dozen states had sent threatening letters. The fiduciary duty ran to shareholders, not to the atmosphere. Each bank could explain, sincerely, that it had done the responsible thing. They went home and slept fine.

That is what capitulation looks like when it wears a good suit. From the outside it reads as cowardice. From the inside it never does. From the inside it feels like maturity.

The banks are useful here precisely because they are far enough away to look at clearly. But the same choreography is running, more quietly, through the world of environmental and conservation organizations — the foundations, the green groups, the advocacy shops — where the rooms are smaller and the dollar figures lower and the surrender is harder to photograph. The strategy memo recommends saying less this year. The bold version of the campaign gets "refined" into the version that offends no one, and everyone in the meeting nods as though refinement and evisceration were the same word. Certain phrases go quietly missing from the website, even though everyone in the building knows those phrases still describe the actual work. None of it is coerced. That is the part worth sitting with.

The reasonable people

There is a name for this, and it does not come from the radical left. The historian Timothy Snyder, writing about how ordinary people behaved as the tyrannies of the last century came on, gave the instruction in three words: *do not obey in advance.* The people who guess what power will want and surrender it before they're asked are not victims of force. They are teachers. They are showing power what it is allowed to do.

The writer M. Gessen — who grew up inside Soviet totalitarianism and now writes about its echoes here — sharpened the point in a way I keep returning to. The trouble with "obeying in advance," Gessen observed, is that it sounds like a failure of nerve you could simply correct. It isn't. When people and institutions hand over power before they have to, they are almost never acting out of raw fear. They are acting on arguments that are completely, infuriatingly reasonable.

You can hear those arguments in any nonprofit conference room in the country. *We can't take the big swing — we have a staff who depend on these paychecks.* *If we lose the funding we can't do any of the good work, so we have to stay in the room.* *You pick your battles; you can't die on every hill.* *If we don't take the deal, someone worse will, and at least this way we keep a seat.* *The era has changed — we have to meet people where they are now.* Every one of these is true. That is the entire problem. There are many good reasons to accommodate a rising power and only one reason not to, and Gessen names it cleanly: the accommodation is itself the brick. Anticipatory obedience is not what happens after you lose. It is how the losing gets built, voluntarily, by sensible people, one prudent decision at a time.

The clearest portrait of the mechanism was drawn almost fifty years ago by a Czech dissident, Václav Havel, and it featured a greengrocer. The grocer puts the official slogan in his shop window — not because he believes it, but because that is simply what one does to be left in peace. Havel's point was not that the grocer is a villain. It was that the whole system runs on millions of grocers, each privately skeptical, each keeping his head down for perfectly understandable reasons, and that a regime built this way needs very little terror, because the compliance does the work for free. *Living within the lie,* he called it. The slogan in the window is not a small thing. It is the thing.

The room where caution feels like wisdom

So far this is a story about fear and incentive, which would be true but incomplete, because it doesn't explain the strangest part: why the caution feels not just safe but *obvious*. Why, in these rooms, the prudent course rarely even gets argued. It is simply assumed, the way water is assumed by fish.

The answer is sitting in the room, and it is the part of this that almost no one will say plainly.

These institutions will tell you, often and earnestly, that they speak for everyone — that nature belongs to all of us, that the cause is universal, that they are building the broadest possible coalition. Then look at who actually runs them, and who they actually reach. The leadership is drawn, with striking consistency, from one slice of the country: a particular set of schools, a particular career path, a particular and comfortable distance from the harms in question. The most recent industry counts show the sector's staff actually growing *less* diverse, not more, even as its assets balloon into the hundreds of billions. Of the philanthropic dollars that flow to this work, a vanishing fraction reaches organizations led by the communities living closest to the damage; the lion's share goes to a short list of large, established, overwhelmingly white-led groups. The rhetoric is universal. The body is narrow.

And here is the thing the establishment cannot see, because you cannot see it from inside: a body that narrow doesn't just produce a narrow set of faces. It produces a narrow set of *fears,* a single shared sense of what is realistic, one common-sense that feels like neutral reality only because everyone in the room happens to share it. A room that has everything in common cannot tell the difference between its own assumptions and the laws of physics. When everyone has the same things to lose, the instinct to protect them feels like wisdom rather than what it is — a class interest, dressed as strategy. There is no one at the table for whom the caution feels insane, because the people for whom it would feel insane were never hired, never funded, never given the microphone.

This is the deepest reason the establishment keeps surrendering. It is not only afraid. It is *homogeneous,* and homogeneity is what lets the fear masquerade as consensus.

I want to be careful and honest here, because the easy version of this argument has curdled into something I don't believe. The diversity push of the last decade overpromised and underdelivered; a great deal of it became ritual — the statement, the training, the carefully worded land acknowledgment — that left the actual distribution of power and money exactly where it was. The backlash now treats that failure as proof that the whole aim was a mistake. It was not. The aim was right, and the execution betrayed it. The point was never decoration or penance. The point was *durability:* an institution that draws its people, and therefore its instincts, from one narrow seam is not built broad — it is built brittle, and it will discover this at the worst possible moment.

Any ecologist can tell you why. A monoculture is the most efficient thing in the world right up until the morning it isn't. A field of identical plants grows fast and clean and orderly, and then one blight arrives that none of them can resist, and because they are all the same, they all fail at once. Resilience does not come from efficiency. It comes from difference — from having something in the system that survives the shock the rest of the system can't. A homogeneous institution is a monoculture, and a monoculture is not strong. It only looks strong, in the good weather, before the blight.

The weather has turned. And the establishment is responding exactly as a monoculture responds: uniformly, in one direction, all at once, toward the ground.

The cautious lose anyway

If the argument from resilience doesn't reach a risk-averse person, there is a blunter one, on the only ground such a person truly respects: caution does not even work.

Gessen tells the story of an editor in Russia who was warned that running a certain article would cost his whole staff their jobs. He killed it. He protected his people. He was responsible. He lives in exile now anyway — the obedience bought him nothing but a slightly later appointment with the same fate, and helped build the regime that kept the appointment. The bargain was a fiction. It always is.

The banks are the same story in a different currency. Look at what their prudence actually purchased. They kept the fossil lending — and with it the long-term risk of holding stranded assets when the transition arrives regardless, as it will. They bought no peace from their critics, who simply added hypocrisy to the charge. And they surrendered the one thing the coalition might have given them: a hand in writing the rules of the largest reallocation of capital in human history, a transition that is coming whether they help steer it or stand in front of it. They gave up their voice and kept their exposure. They lost the future and got nothing for the present.

This is the iron logic of the half-measure. It does not protect the institution. It makes the institution complicit *and* irrelevant — disgraced for what it permitted, forgotten for what it failed to attempt. The safe path turns out to be the dangerous one. The cautious leader is not buying security. He is paying down, in monthly installments, his own obsolescence.

Loyalty is not silence

There is an old map for this, drawn by an economist no institution could call a radical. Albert Hirschman observed that when something you belong to starts to fail, you have three moves. You can leave. You can stay quiet and loyal. Or you can stay and raise hell — what he called *voice* — precisely because you refuse to walk away. His central finding ran against intuition: silent loyalty is how good institutions rot. The members who care the most but say the least are the ones who let the decline happen, because their silence registers as consent and removes the only pressure that might have forced a correction.

The cautious leader has confused loyalty with silence. He believes that protecting the institution means not making trouble for it, and he has it precisely backward. Voice is the loyal act. You raise hell *because* you love the thing and refuse to watch it hollow into a logo with no one home. The person quietly managing the decline — smoothing every edge, deleting the inconvenient words, refining the campaign into harmlessness — is not the institution's protector. He is its embalmer, and he has mistaken the stillness of the body for peace.

Which turns the usual accusation inside out. In a moment like this one, the people counseling retreat are not the conservatives in the room. They are the radicals — presiding over an irreversible transformation, accepting as temporary a set of losses that compound into permanence. Courage is the conservative act. It is what you do when you actually mean to *conserve* something. Caution, now, is just slow surrender with better manners. The honest question for anyone who loves these institutions is not *am I being brave* but a quieter one: when this period is written down, and it will be, which sentence has my name in it — the one about the people who used their standing while they still had it, or the one about the reasonable, credentialed, responsible people who kept the slogan in the window until there was nothing left to protect?

What I can see from here

I can write this from a particular angle, and I should say where I'm standing.

I did not come from the seam these institutions recruit from. I came from a poor and modest place — the kind of place these grand environmental bargains were always *about* and almost never made *in.* My family's history is, in part, a ledger of the costs that somebody else's celebrated victories were quietly built on: the uranium, the coal, the land that became another organization's success story. I have spent a career inside and alongside these institutions anyway, because I happen to believe in them — I think a well-built institution is one of the most generous things people make, a machine for keeping a promise across time, longer than any single person's nerve. I am not an arsonist. I want these things to last.

But because I am not from the room, I can see the thing the room can't. I can see that the caution which feels like physics in there is just the shape of a particular set of fears. And I can tell you something about the fall that everyone in that room is so afraid of — the lost grant, the cold donor, the year spent rebuilding — because I started at the bottom of it. It is real. It is also survivable. The catastrophe being quietly catastrophized is, in fact, *bearable* — and the fear of it is already costing far more than the fall ever could. That is not a moral failing. It is a failure of imagination, which is a more hopeful diagnosis, because imagination can be repaired.

The renovation

A crisis is not only a danger to an institution. It is the rare moment one gets to become more than it was.

Good weather lets organizations calcify — around their donors, their comfort, their founding blind spots, the quiet narrowness no one has had to confront because nothing forced the question. A crisis forces the question. It is the one moment when the people the establishment has spent decades failing to reach will actually listen, because they can feel the ground moving too — and they are not waiting for moderation. They are waiting for someone with standing and a microphone to say plainly what is happening to them. They do not want consensus. They want a witness.

That is the opening, and it is also the way out of the monoculture. The brave version of this work does not spend the crisis protecting what the institution already is. It spends the crisis making the institution broader, and therefore sturdier, than it has ever been — drawing in the people and the instincts and the fears it has always lacked, which is the only thing that has ever made any living system survive a shock. Courage and durability are not in tension here. In this moment they are the same act.

I learned most of what I know about persistence from a river. The one I have spent my life on does not check your credentials and does not wait for your nerve. It moves whether anyone is brave or not, and it carves the canyon either way. The only real choice on offer is whether you are part of the force that shapes the country the water runs through — or one more thing it routes around, on its way to a future that has stopped including you.

The water is rising. It would be a terrible thing to have spent these years standing guard at the door, with our backs turned, while the thing we loved was carried quietly out the back.

---

Notes & sources

-Net-Zero Banking Alliance — founding (Glasgow, COP26, 2021), membership and assets, dissolution (suspended Aug. 27, 2025; wound down into a non-binding framework early Oct. 2025):** Guardian / fintech trade coverage (Oct. 2025); The Conversation / phys.org, "Banks retreat from climate change commitments" (Sept. 25, 2025). Confirm current membership/asset figures, which shifted repeatedly.

- Six largest U.S. banks departing (late 2024–early 2025); Wells Fargo dropping its 2030 and 2050 targets (Feb. 28, 2025):** Sierra Club, "US Banks Quit Climate Alliances and Targets" (Mar. 20, 2025). Verify the exact sequence/dates of departures before asserting them.

- ~$869B in fossil-fuel financing by the largest banks in 2024:** *Banking on Climate Chaos 2025* (Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, et al.).

- State AG pressure / anti-ESG legal climate:** widely reported; 23 Republican AGs opened inquiries into climate target-setting bodies (2024).

- "Do not obey in advance":** Timothy Snyder, *On Tyranny* (2017), Lesson 1.

- The five reasonable arguments; the editor in exile:** M. Gessen, "The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump," *The New York Times* (Feb. 8, 2025); part of the collection awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing.

- “Living within the lie" / the greengrocer:** Václav Havel, *The Power of the Powerless* (1978).

- Exit, voice, and loyalty:** Albert O. Hirschman, *Exit, Voice, and Loyalty* (1970).

- Sector diversity declining; philanthropic distribution skewed to large, mostly white-led groups:** Green 2.0 annual NGO diversity reporting; your own figures from the prior essay (≈1.3% of $1.34B to BIPOC-led groups; roughly half of climate philanthropy to ~20 organizations) — re-confirm against the latest reports before publishing.

And that is precisely the problem. Because the people deploying that sentence are not making a claim about thermodynamics. They are making a claim about us. And somewhere between the river’s indifference and the funder’s PowerPoint, a true thing becomes a lie.

There is now an organization called Nature Is Nonpartisan. A real one — a 501(c)(3), founded in 2025 by Benji Backer, a young conservative who had spent years building a right-of-center environmental brand. There is a Wilderness Society–funded initiative called Ground Shift, convening what it calls cross-partisan conversations about the future of public lands — its own materials placing private lands, market-based tools, and bottom-up approaches at the center. The mood I had been arguing against for years has incorporated. It has a logo and a board and a week — the governor of South Dakota signed a proclamation declaring a Nature Is Nonpartisan Week — and it is being sold to the people who fund my world as a magic bullet. So let me say plainly what I think it is.

Nature is nonpartisan the way the river is nonpartisan. The current takes whoever it takes. The indifference is real — and it tells you nothing about who we put in the boat, and who we put in the water.

Partisan is not political

Here is the sleight of hand, and you have to watch the hands carefully or you will miss it.

“Partisan” and “political” are not the same word, and the nonpartisan project depends on you never noticing the difference. Partisan is the narrow thing: Team Red, Team Blue, the jersey, the donor list, the election. Political is the broad thing, the old thing — the process by which a community makes binding decisions about who gets what and who bears which risk. The pitch wants you to believe it only ever means the narrow one — just keep the parties out of it, keep the logos off the trailhead. But I’m not going to pretend even that smaller claim is one I share. Some of the most important environmental work I have ever done was nakedly partisan: I have spent real money and real months getting Native voters to the polls, because on a reservation the distance between who governs and whether the water gets cleaned is not abstract, it is measured in years and in funerals. I keep these two words apart on purpose. They are the ones who blur them — collapsing “political” into “partisan” so that any mention of power can be waved off as just more red-and-blue noise, beneath the dignity of people who love the land.

But that is not what the sentence does in the room. In the room, “don’t make it partisan” slides into “don’t make it political,” and those are different sentences with different victims. Every water allocation is political. Every leasing decision is political. Every acre that gets managed for recreation instead of restored to the people it was taken from is political. The decision about whose lungs sit downwind of the refinery is political. You cannot depoliticize that, because there is no neutral way to decide who breathes. There is only a decision, and a beneficiary, and a bill.

So when I’m told nature is nonpartisan, I hear a wish — the wish to be exempt from politics. And I have noticed who gets to make that wish. It is never the family at the fenceline. It is never my grandfather, who mined uranium on the Navajo Nation for men who knew what it would do to him and chose not to tell him. The wish for exemption is a luxury good, and like all luxury goods it is priced precisely out of reach of the people who need it most.

I should say, because honesty is the whole point of this essay: I am not neutral either. I run a company that tells justice-centered stories. I have a stake in this being a fight. I have a paycheck and a position and a grandfather. So does every funder who tells me to rise above the fray. So do the people building Nature Is Nonpartisan. The claim I am making is not that I stand on neutral ground and they don’t. It is that there is no neutral ground — not for me, not for them, not for anyone — and the lie is pretending otherwise.

“Again” is the tell

Listen for the word again. It hides inside the pitch like a splinter. The dream being sold is that we can all come together around nature again, the way we supposedly did before everything got so divided.

I want to be fair to that dream, because it is not entirely a fantasy. There really was a bipartisan era. Nixon signed the EPA into being. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act — these passed with Republican votes in the early 1970s, and they worked, and I am not going to stand here and pretend they didn’t. Even recently, the Great American Outdoors Act drew both parties. The nonpartisan instinct can point at those wins and say: see, it’s possible.

It can. But look at what those victories have in common. They protected charismatic landscapes and shared, suburban-ish air — goods that could be won without anyone having to name who pays. Bipartisanship is available exactly where there is no loser to identify. The moment you ask the distributional question — whose land, whose body, whose water, whose treaty — the consensus evaporates, because that question has a loser by design, and no amount of framing makes a loser feel like a winner.

And the past only looks rosy if you refuse to look at who was standing just outside the frame. While Congress was passing the Clean Water Act, my mother and her siblings were in boarding schools — the long federal project of turning Diné children into someone the country found easier to live with. In December of 1974, the same stretch of years that produced the Endangered Species Act, President Ford signed Public Law 93-531, the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, setting in motion the forced relocation of roughly ten thousand Diné people from Black Mesa — one of the largest forced removals of Native people in this country’s modern history. What sat under that land was coal. Peabody stripped it and slurried it to distant power plants with water pumped from the aquifer my relatives drank from. That same year, the Navajo Generating Station came online. So do the arithmetic with me: the clean air that era is congratulated for was paid for, in part, by fouling ours — by taking Diné land, Diné water, and Diné children, and filing the whole transaction under progress. The consensus felt like consensus because the people covering the cost were never asked to the table. Some of them were my family. Some of them were children.

The new organization embodies this almost too perfectly to be parody. Its board reportedly spans David Bernhardt — Interior Secretary in the first Trump administration — and Michael Brune, the former executive director of the Sierra Club. That is the dream in a single conference room: get the Interior Secretary and the Sierra Club to agree again. But notice the cost of agreement. The organization’s public action plan sidesteps climate entirely; the words “climate change” and “carbon emissions” are simply absent from its website — even as the founder concedes, in plain English, that the group is “all about climate change.” The terms are gone because, as he puts it, climate has become a culture-war nonstarter. That is what the table costs. To seat everyone, you delete the subject. You buy unity by subtraction — and you should start asking, immediately, who gets subtracted.

The partner they strangled

The whole nonpartisan project rests on an assumption of symmetry: two good-faith parties who would meet in the middle if only we lowered the temperature. I want to be careful and specific here, because this is where the argument is usually softest and I refuse to be soft.

The symmetry is false, and we have the receipts, because the right had an environmental wing and killed it on purpose. In 2006, eighty-six prominent evangelical leaders signed a climate initiative declaring that their faith compelled them to act on warming. Southern Baptists preached creation-care sermons through the 1970s and ’80s. This was real. And it was deliberately strangled — not lost, not faded, strangled — by an organized campaign. The Cornwall Alliance produced a video series literally titled to cast environmentalism as a “green dragon” for Christians to resist. Movement leaders pressured the National Association of Evangelicals until its most prominent climate voice was pushed out for the crime of talking about global warming. The partner existed. It was murdered inside its own house.

And the asymmetry is not a museum piece. As I write this, a senator has slipped a poison-pill amendment onto a once-bipartisan wildfire bill in order to gut the Roadless Rule, the protection covering some forty-five million acres of national forest. One side keeps arriving at the common-ground table in good faith. The other keeps mining underneath it. To call for nonpartisanship in that fight is not neutrality. It is unilateral disarmament, dressed as maturity.

So who, exactly, am I supposed to befriend?

This is the part the framing cannot survive, and it is the part only some of us can see, because you have to be standing where I’m standing to see it.

When the nonpartisan project asks Native and brown communities to extend a hand across the aisle, I need to be honest about whose hand we are being asked to take. In this same year, on this same calendar:

The administration proposed cutting core tribal programs by roughly twenty-four percent — about nine hundred and eleven million dollars — from the very funds that exist to honor treaty obligations. A Brookings Institution analysis found that a federal grant freeze would strip as much as twenty-four and a half billion dollars from Native communities, money owed under those treaties, touching nearly every tribe in the country. This is not a culture-war abstraction. It is clinics, it is water systems, it is tribal firefighters who didn’t get hired before fire season.

And the enforcement is worse than the budget. As immigration raids ramped up, agents began stopping Native people — U.S. citizens since 1924 — and rejecting their tribal IDs and Certificates of Indian Blood as insufficient proof that they belong in the only country they have ever had. The Navajo Nation Council reported citizens detained; in one case, by the Council’s account, for nine hours. By this spring, Brookings was documenting Native Americans swept up in the Minneapolis raids that began late last year, the ones where some two thousand federal agents flooded the Twin Cities and where agents shot and killed U.S. citizens in the street. And underneath all of it, a Justice Department brief filed in January of 2025 reached up and called Native birthright citizenship itself into question.

I’ll be rigorous, because rigor is the point: the Department of Homeland Security denies all of this. It calls the profiling allegations false and insists its agents are trained to honor tribal identification. Fine — put that on the record, and then weigh it against the volume. Multiple tribal governments issued warnings to their own citizens. Two United States senators wrote to the Secretary of Homeland Security about it. Brookings documented it. A government does not deny what is not happening at that scale.

And it is not only what the administration does. It is who the coalition is, and what it has chosen to hold. Since 2017 — since the torches in Charlottesville, the men chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” and a President who looked at that and found “very fine people on both sides” — the coalition I am invited to make peace with has made a decision, in public, again and again: that it can platform white nationalism, normalize it, and win with it. Layered over it is a Christian nationalism that has moved from the margins to the lectern. Project 2025, the governing blueprint widely described as a Christian-nationalist document — its defenders insist it declares no state religion, and that is fair to note — counts among its earliest targets the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency. The current Speaker of the House describes his own worldview in explicitly biblical terms. I am not claiming that every person who votes for this coalition is a white nationalist or a theocrat; that would be both false and lazy. I am observing that the coalition decided it could hold those people — and that it asks me to treat the decision as a detail.

And here is the part that should stop anyone who actually believes nature is the great uniter. The far right has its own environmentalism, and it is old, and it did not arrive from outside — it grew up inside the house. “Blood and soil” was a Nazi doctrine before it was a torch-lit chant: the claim that a people’s purity is bound to its land. The man who murdered twenty-three people in El Paso in 2019 gave whole passages of his manifesto to environmental degradation, framing the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” as an ecological threat and reasoning that if you remove enough people, the American way of life becomes sustainable. That is not a foreign infection of conservation. It is a strain of it. The throughline, as one historian of the movement put it, is the equation of the nation with an ecosystem and nonwhite people with an invasive species — and it has lived in our own institutions. The Sierra Club, of all organizations, spent the late 1990s and 2000s fighting off two organized attempts by the network around John Tanton — a former Club member whose biographers trace his white nationalism directly back to his environmental advocacy — to convert the country’s most famous green group into a vehicle for immigration restriction. The members beat it back, twice. But tens of thousands of them voted for it. “The land” is not neutral ground. People have organized under that banner, and built movements under it, and they were not embarrassed.

So here is the question the nonpartisan framing cannot answer. The coalition I am being asked to find common ground with is, right now, defunding my relatives’ health care, rejecting my relatives’ identification, and litigating whether my relatives are citizens at all. You cannot find common ground with people who are actively contesting whether you get to stand on the ground. “Let’s not make this political” is not, in that context, a generous invitation. It is a request that the targeted disappear quietly, so the table stays pleasant for everyone who isn’t being hunted.

And here is what happens when I say any of this out loud — when I decline the invitation and explain why. I become the problem. Not the man chanting about replacement; me, for being unable to let it go. The conversation pivots, smoothly and instantly, from the hate group to my tone. I am told I am being divisive, that I am dragging politics into something pure, that surely we can set all of that aside and agree on the watershed. And the people saying it are sincere, which is the hardest part, because their sincerity is purchased by distance. They can look past the white nationalist in the coalition because nothing he says is pointed at them. For them, he is an embarrassing uncle at a very large family cookout. For me, he is a man calmly explaining why my nation should not be sovereign, why my ceremonies are devil-worship, why my relatives are an invasion to be repelled. To ask me to bracket that for the sake of a wetlands coalition is to ask me to rank the wetland above my own continued existence — and then to treat my refusal, rather than the hatred, as the breach of manners. So let me be plain: I have zero interest in building an alliance over the environment with people who cannot understand why I would hesitate. The inability to understand is itself the tell. It means none of it ever cost them anything.

That is where brown folks get jettisoned. Not maliciously, usually — that’s the insidious part. They get jettisoned because to maintain the fiction of a unified “we who all love nature,” you have to round down to zero the people for whom nature was never the question. The question was always whether they’d be allowed to remain.

Neutrality is a solvent

Here is the structural fact that ties the funder’s PowerPoint to the agent at the gas station, and I want you to sit with how tight the connection is.

The entire edifice of federal Indian law rests on a 1974 Supreme Court case, Morton v. Mancari, which held that the government’s relationship to tribes is political rather than racial in nature. That single distinction is load-bearing. Because tribal status is a political classification — citizenship in a sovereign nation — it survives the colorblindness doctrine that would otherwise dissolve it. For fifty years, anti-sovereignty litigants have been trying to recharacterize tribes as a race, because if they win that recharacterization, strict scrutiny applies and the whole structure of treaty law becomes vulnerable to “equal protection” attack. When the Court struck down race-conscious admissions in 2023, it handed those litigants a freshly sharpened blade.

Now look at the language. “Colorblindness.” “Equal treatment.” “Why should any one group get special protection?” “Transcending division.” It is the grammar of neutrality, and it is being used as a solvent — a substance whose entire function is to dissolve the protections that exist for the specific people who need them. The Justice Department brief questioning Native birthright citizenship and the agent rejecting a tribal ID are not separate from the courtroom strategy. They are the same machine, running in a different venue.

And “nature is nonpartisan” is that same machine, running in the conservation register. It is the grammar of neutrality applied to the environment — the suggestion that fairness means refusing to take sides, that the mature position is the one above the fray. I am not saying the funder who reaches for that phrase wants Oak Flat destroyed. I am saying something more uncomfortable and harder to dodge: the framing does work in the world independent of anyone’s intentions. Every time “neutrality” is treated as the high ground, the cost of the dissolving strategy goes down — for everyone, including the people filing the briefs. Intent is irrelevant to whether the solvent dissolves.

The gate is a budget

I want to get specific about the people who reach for “nonpartisan,” because the reflex is not random. It is the predictable output of who they are.

Picture the rooms where this language lives. They are convenings — the cross-partisan conversation, the table, the dialogue. And a convening, unlike a movement, requires conveners: people who decide who gets a chair, what counts as constructive, and what reads as divisive. That is not a neutral service. It is a gate, and whoever runs the convening holds the key. The barrier to entry used to be knowing what FLPMA stands for. Now it is subtler and worse — you have to agree, before you walk in, to leave your grief at the door. To say “stakeholder” where you mean “the family whose well it crosses.” To perform the calm that marks you as serious. Show up angry, insist on naming the body count, and you are not refuted. You are recategorized: not constructive, not ready for the table, a problem for the facilitator to manage. The gate filters people, and through them it filters ideas — with great precision, the only ideas that actually threaten the arrangement.

Now look, coldly, at who is standing on the near side of that gate, because the sector counts itself and the count is a matter of record. For years, the share of staff of color at the largest environmental NGOs crept slowly upward. In 2024, for the first time since the tracking began, it fell — down nine percent in a single year. At the top it had never really moved at all: the representation of people of color on the boards and senior staffs of these organizations has not increased since 2022. Even at its high-water mark, the diversity thinned at every rung up the ladder. The Nature Conservancy’s own diversity officer, staring at the decline, framed the open question as why colleagues of color keep leaving.

I can answer that one. They leave because the place runs on their unpaid labor. The most senior brown person in the building gets quietly conscripted as its interpreter of poverty and race — asked to translate the lived facts of the communities the organization claims to serve into a dialect the organization can process, for free, on top of the job they were actually hired to do. I have done that translation in more meetings than I can count. The exhaustion is not the point. The point is that I had to — that the room had no one else who could see what I was seeing, and that this is true of nearly every table I am invited to. That is the finding hiding inside my fatigue. The composition is the blind spot. An institution staffed almost entirely by people who have never stood at a fenceline will keep mistaking its own distance for neutrality, because in that room the exemption really is the default.

And it is not only race. It is class and geography, and here the easy story breaks in a way worth paying attention to. The big greens cluster in a handful of coastal cities and the capital, and from those offices they conserve a rural country most of their staff has only visited. The lazy assumption is that rural America does not care. The data says otherwise: in one national survey, seventy-one percent of rural voters called the environment personally important — within a few points of their urban and suburban neighbors — and said they would accept real economic cost to protect it. What they will not accept is being managed from a distance by people who never asked them. They distrust the fairness of far-off authority; they want to be consulted. So the credentialed model pulls off the same trick on two populations at once: it talks at rural communities it does not resemble, and it talks past communities of color it cannot retain. Both are standing outside the same gate.

This is older than any of us. The movement was built in the 1890s by men like Muir urging wealthy white gentlemen to revere nature as pristine, recreational space — a framing that severed environmentalism from the working class at the moment of its birth. Environment-as-a-place-you-visit was always a class position. It is still wearing the same coat.

And the money confirms the shape, because in the end the gate is a budget. Of roughly $1.34 billion in annual climate grantmaking from twelve of the largest funders, about 1.3 percent reached BIPOC-led, justice-focused groups. A separate analysis found half of all climate philanthropy flowing to twenty national organizations — some ninety percent of them led by white people, eighty percent by men. The legible, mostly-white institutions get the half; the people on the actual front lines — shutting down the plant, getting the lead out of the water, fighting the mine on their own ancestral ground — fight over the scraps, year to year, on budgets that would not cover one legacy group’s communications department. That is not a movement that happens to be unrepresentative. It is an arrangement. And “nonpartisan” is the password that keeps it intact.

Here is what should worry the people running it: the real work has already started leaving the building. It is migrating to Indigenous-led conservation grounded in land relationships older than this country, to tribal nations winning co-management fights, to community land trusts organized around survival rather than recreation. The gate is being built, in part, because the wall it replaces has begun to fail.

The bet is already losing

Set the morality aside for a moment. I will come back for it. Suppose you feel none of what I have just described — you are a funder, a board member, a program officer, and you want only to win. Even then, on your own coldest terms, the nonpartisan bet is a bad one, and the returns are already coming in.

Here is the bet. In 2024, voters of color — especially men — moved right by historic margins. Trump won the largest share of Latino voters any Republican ever has, and, for the first time, a majority of Latino men. Among the young the shift was steepest: Democratic support fell roughly sixteen points among young Latino men and ten among young Black men. The reaction in my world was swift, and it is now everywhere — a great lowering of the temperature, a rush to the center, a sudden enthusiasm for not making things political, lest we drive these voters further away. Nature is nonpartisan. Let’s all just get along.

But read the data one layer down and the realignment dissolves. These were not converts to conservatism. The same analyses that measured the shift name the groups it ran through: people of color, young voters, men, and — the term is the analysts’, not mine — irregular voters. Low-engagement, sporadic, economically squeezed people who do not follow politics closely and who turned out, when they turned out, to register a complaint about prices. The old faith that the disengaged are a sleeping progressive army is dead: the validated studies found that if every eligible American had voted in 2024, the margin would have barely moved. Engagement, not ideology, is the axis now. And engagement does not respond to consensus. It responds to stakes made visible.

Watch what happened the instant the stakes became visible. By 2025 the same voters had swung back so hard it embarrassed the forecasts. In New Jersey, the Democrat took sixty-eight percent of Latinos and flipped nearly one in five Latinos who had voted for Trump the year before — winning Latino men outright. The precincts tell it plainest: a county Trump had carried by three points went blue by fifteen; an eighty-percent-Latino city that Harris won by seventeen went Democratic by sixty-nine — a fifty-point swing in twelve months. Virginia ran the same. A Republican strategist, no friend of the left, said his own party lost in 2025 for exactly the reasons the Democrats had lost in 2024. That is the whole thesis in an opponent’s mouth: this electorate is not realigning. It is punishing whoever holds power while it stays disengaged.

And the thing that re-engaged it was not anyone playing nice. It was ICE. As the raids spread, the administration’s net approval among Latinos collapsed by more than twenty points in a year; on the deportation program specifically, the swing away was larger still. The drop was sharpest among men — the same bloc that had moved right the year before. None of that came from a convening, or a depoliticized frame, or a carefully deleted word. It came from people watching agents pull their neighbors out of cars and deciding, viscerally, that they had a side after all. A Latino organizer called the 2024 shift “a cry for help” and named the moment we are in a “populist moment.” She is right, and the operative word in that sentence is populist — not centrist.

So here is the warning, in the language of returns. The communities the nonpartisan frame rounds down to zero are the swing. They are the most volatile, most decisive, most genuinely up-for-grabs bloc in the country, and they engage for whoever names their stakes without flinching — which is the precise opposite of “let’s not make it political.” Spend this period lowering the temperature, deleting the word climate to keep the table pleasant, declining to build any real relationship with the people doing the work, and when the pendulum swings back — it always swings back — you will have built nothing to catch it. You will have spent the crisis being polite. The same gate that keeps these communities off your staff is the thing keeping you from seeing that they are your only durable majority. Disengaged and engaged, fenceline and convening table: it is the same line, drawn twice.

The crater and the mine

Let me end where the abstraction becomes flesh.

This spring, Oak Flat — Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, sacred to the Apache — became private property. The Supreme Court declined twice to hear the case; the land passed to a copper company; the drilling is ramping up toward a crater nearly two miles wide that will swallow a place people have prayed at for longer than this country has existed. And the justification offered, the one I cannot stop turning over, is that the copper is needed to power a clean-energy future. The green transition itself, wearing the costume of neutrality, swinging the shovel. Nothing about that is nonpartisan. Someone decided whose sacred site was an acceptable price for everyone’s solar panels, and that someone was not Apache.

And then there is my grandfather’s mine. The physics of radioactive decay is perfectly indifferent. It does not check tribal enrollment; the alpha particle is the most nonpartisan thing in the universe. But the decision to dig there, on Diné land, into Diné lungs — the decision not to warn the men, the decision to let them carry the dust home on their clothes to their children, the decision, decades later, to make compensation a paperwork labyrinth — none of that was physics. All of it was politics. All of it was power deciding whose lives would count and whose would be spent. “Radiation is nonpartisan” would be, in my grandfather’s mouth, both literally true and obscene.

That is the whole thing, in two images. The indifference is real. It is also beside the point. What was never indifferent — what was always a choice, always political, always about power — is who we decided to put in the water.

So when they tell you nature is nonpartisan, believe the narrow part and refuse the rest. The river doesn’t care who you are. Everything we do about the river is nothing but a statement of who we think counts. To call that neutral is not to rise above the fight. It is to take a side and lie about it — which, when you think it through, is the most partisan move on the board: the position that survives by swearing it isn’t one.

Notes & sources

• Nature Is Nonpartisan. Founded in 2025 by Benji Backer (founder of the American Conservation Coalition; author of The Conservative Environmentalist). The board spanning David Bernhardt and Michael Brune, and partners including the National Wildlife Federation, American Forests, and Ducks Unlimited, are reported by the North Dakota Monitor and South Dakota Searchlight (March 2025). The South Dakota proclamation establishing “Nature Is Nonpartisan Week” was signed by Gov. Larry Rhoden. The absence of “climate change” and “carbon emissions” from the organization’s website, alongside Backer’s statement that the group is “all about climate change” but treats the term as a culture-war nonstarter, comes from his interview with Imagine5 (Dec. 2025).

• Ground Shift. Wilderness Society–funded public-lands initiative; advisory figures include former Biden BLM director (and Wilderness Society president) Tracy Stone-Manning and Bush-era Interior figures such as Lynn Scarlett, alongside Indigenous leaders such as Jim Enote (Zuni). The “private lands, market-based tools, and bottom-up approaches” framing is from the group’s own website. Note: keep the “white-led” descriptor in the philanthropy section attached to Nature Is Nonpartisan/Backer, not to Ground Shift.

• The 1.3% figure. From the 2020 New School research conducted for the Donors of Color Network’s Climate Funders Justice Pledge: of ~$1.34 billion in annual climate grantmaking from twelve of the largest U.S. environmental funders, ~1.3% went to BIPOC-led, justice-focused organizations.

• The “half to twenty groups” figure. The Solutions Project’s analysis of Northwestern University research: roughly half of philanthropic climate funding goes to twenty national organizations, ~90% led by white people, ~80% by men. A different study measuring a different thing than the 1.3% figure; cited together because they describe the same concentration from two angles.

• Environmental NGO staffing/diversity. Green 2.0’s NGO & Foundation Transparency Report Card: people of color were ~36.5% of full-time NGO staff at the 2022 peak; the 2024 report found the first decline in racial/ethnic diversity in the report’s history, with full-time staff of color falling ~9% from 2023 to 2024, and zero increase in board/senior-staff representation since 2022. The retention framing draws on The Nature Conservancy’s DEI officer’s response to that report. Canonical background: Dorceta Taylor, The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations (2014), which coined the “green ceiling.”

• Rural conservation attitudes. Duke University’s Nicholas Institute (Robert Bonnie), 2019 national poll: ~71% of rural and ~75% of urban/suburban voters called the environment personally important; rural respondents distrust the fairness of federal regulation and prefer local collaboration and consultation.

• Class origins of the movement. On Muir/Thoreau-era preservationism framing nature as elite recreational space and severing environmentalism from the working class, see histories of the conservation movement (e.g., Applied Economics Clinic, “The Environmental Movement Has a Long, Exclusionary History”).

• 2024 electoral shift. Trump’s ~45–48% Latino share (highest ever for a Republican) and his majority of Latino men are documented across Edison exit polls, Pew’s validated-voter study, and Catalist. Catalist’s report found the steepest Democratic declines among young Latino men (~16 points) and young Black men (~10 points), and names “irregular voters” among the four interconnected groups where Harris lost most. Pew: GOP-leaning eligible voters turned out at higher rates than Democratic-leaning ones, and a fully-eligible electorate would not have meaningfully changed the margin.

• 2025 reversal. New Jersey and Virginia off-year results (CBS, ABC, NBC exit polls; Movement Voter Project compilation; NYT precinct estimates): Sherrill won ~68% of NJ Latinos and flipped ~18% of Latino Trump voters, winning Latino men and women; Spanberger won ~67% of VA Latinos. Precinct examples: Passaic County (~45% Latino) Trump +3 (2024) → Sherrill +15 (2025); Union City (~82% Latino) Harris +17 → Sherrill +69; Manassas Park (~40–46% Latino) ~22-point leftward swing. GOP strategist Mike Madrid’s line that Republicans lost “for exactly the same reasons” Democrats had a year earlier; Voto Latino’s Maria Teresa Kumar’s “cry for help” / “populist moment” framing.

• ICE backlash polling. Trump’s net approval among Latinos falling from roughly −5 to −28 over a year, with a 30-point-plus swing on deportation (Harry Enten/CNN); Latino congressional ballot moving from Harris +4 (2024) to Democrats +19 (2026 polling). Reuters/Ipsos found the immigration-approval drop concentrated among men (to ~41% from ~50%). Equis/Data for Progress (May 2025): Latinos 66–29 say the administration’s actions go “too far.” Gallup (July 2025): ~80% of Hispanics disapprove of Trump on immigration. The 2018-midterm parallel (defensive high turnout breaking against Republicans) is noted by multiple analysts.

• Tribal funding cuts. The ~24% / ~$911M proposed cut to core tribal programs and the Brookings estimate that a federal grant freeze would strip ~$24.5 billion owed under treaty obligations are drawn from 2025 reporting (Tribal Business News, Alaska Beacon) and Senate Committee on Indian Affairs materials.

• ICE and tribal IDs. Reports of Native U.S. citizens being stopped and having tribal IDs/CDIBs rejected, the Minneapolis enforcement surge (including the killing of U.S. citizens during operations), and the January 2025 DOJ brief questioning Native birthright citizenship are documented by Brookings (2026), Searchlight New Mexico, Snopes, and a 2025 letter from U.S. senators to the Secretary of Homeland Security. DHS denies racial profiling and says agents are trained to honor tribal identification; that denial is noted in the text.

• Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535 (1974): the holding that the federal relationship to tribes is “political rather than racial in nature.” On the campaign to recharacterize it, see the Indian Law Resource Center and recent legal scholarship; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) is the colorblindness ruling referenced.

• Oak Flat. The Supreme Court declined the Apache Stronghold case in 2025; the land has since passed to Resolution Copper, with the project justified in part as a copper source for the energy transition.

• Black Mesa and boarding schools. Public Law 93-531, the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, signed December 1974, led to the forced relocation of 10,000+ Diné people from Black Mesa to enable coal development (Peabody); the Navajo Generating Station came online in 1974. (Cultural Survival; ProPublica; Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission; verify dates against family history before publishing.)

• White nationalism, Christian nationalism, and ecofascism. Charlottesville “Unite the Right,” 2017 (“blood and soil,” “Jews will not replace us”), and the “very fine people” response. Project 2025 is widely characterized as a Christian-nationalist governing blueprint and proposes eliminating the EPA; its defenders dispute the theocratic framing and note it declares no state religion (Heritage Foundation; Salon; fact-checks). On ecofascism: the El Paso (2019) shooter folded environmental/“Great Replacement” themes into a white-nationalist manifesto (The Intercept; The Conversation; E&E News). On the movement’s own history: John Tanton’s network attempted to capture the Sierra Club on immigration grounds, defeated in member votes in 1998 and 2004 (Southern Poverty Law Center; ProPublica; The American Prospect). These characterizations are attributed in the text; keep them attributed in the published version.

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