Owl in America || December 21, 2024
Notes from an American environmentalist
“Owl in America” is a series of letters chronicling the next four years from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. Practicing conservation and public-lands law during the first Trump administration was an exercise in hope and dogged persistence amidst the ever more effective demolition issuing forth from Washington, D.C. Much ground was lost, only some of which was regained during Biden’s four-year term. This time around, I’m taking notes.
Hi all~
Happy Solstice, whether it is summer or winter where you are. To me, this time always feels like the final grab-and-pull near the top of a roller coaster, before the pause, the suspension of time, and then the gathering rush of the after-New Year descent. In 2024, sitting here in the U.S., this period seems particularly fraught. As we ride out the last days of this presidency, there’s a heaviness to this interlude before late January’s headlong acceleration.
My work in public lands and wildlife policy is undergirded by strong environmental laws and federal agencies empowered—and funded—to carry them out. The incoming team has said it will renew its assault on all facets of that framework. The first-term Trump administration showed us what it would do to our natural world. Through Project 2025 and various pronouncements, they’ve laid out a coherent, second-term game plan that’s more of the same. This time, though, the players appear better prepared. Foreboding dogs my spirit.
But time enough for all that after the inauguration on January 20. For now, I’m settling in for the longest night and a period of quiet contemplation to follow. I’ll be taking a short break from the political chaos and will return with Owl in America after my family’s informal Yuletide. In the interim, I’ll share a piece or two I’ve prepared on happier topics.
For today, in the spirit of a little holiday gift, I’ll leave you with a grab bag of environmental wins I haven’t shared here before. (And I promise to refrain from laying out methods Trump might use to unwind them!) There’s some pretty great stuff below. Enjoy, and I’ll be back with more Owl observations on January 6.
The U.S. Department of the Interior under Secretary Deb Haaland prioritized bison restoration during Biden’s term. In addition to spearheading the push to name the bison as our national mammal, Interior started a fiscal program in 2021 (with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation) to support locally led conservation projects. Now, this administration’s final round of funding has released $3 million to the Eastern Shoshone Tribe of Wyoming to help it build its bison herd and strengthen the inter-tribal herd share program. With 83 member tribes, this coalition funnels “excess” bison from Yellowstone National Park, that would otherwise be killed, to tribes looking to restore the animal to their lands.
Before Secretary Haaland directed the Interior agency, she was a Congressional representative for her home state of New Mexico. A member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribal nation, she identifies as a “35th generation New Mexican,” and is reportedly contemplating a run for state governorship upon her return from D.C.
In other symbolic animal news, I (and almost every website I visited today) thought the bald eagle was our country’s official bird. Turns out, the eagle has never officially been designated, despite its pride of place on our national seal and other iconography, as well as in the popular imagination. This oversight came to light when an eagle enthusiast doing research for a book searched records as far back as the founding of the country and failed to find a Congressional declaration to that effect.
He reached out to California Senator Dianne Feinstein with his concern, and her staffers dug through the National Archives to confirm. With the senator’s support, he began lobbying lawmakers to introduce a bill to rectify the omission, but he said few were initially interested because, like most of us, they believed the bald eagle had long been designated. Finally, a group of Minnesota Congresspeople brought forward an official bill, which has now passed both houses and awaits Biden’s signature to become law.
Bald eagles are considered among the Endangered Species Act’s greatest success stories. They were removed from the list in 2007 after their population had recovered enough that they were no longer in danger of extinction. The bird had been listed under a predecessor law to the ESA in 1967 and recovered spectacularly after the U.S. banned the pesticide DDT, which caused their eggshells to thin such that baby eagles died before hatching. Besides the national mammal—bison—and bird—soon to be the bald eagle—the U.S. also has a national tree, the oak, and a national flower, the rose.
In Maryland, Secretary Haaland has set aside a new reserve called the Southern Maryland Woodlands National Wildlife Refuge, about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. It is only 31 acres, but will be augmented to 300 acres of waterside and forested habitat in the next few months by donations from the Nature Conservancy. It is intended as a seed for an eventual 40,000-acre refuge which the agency plans to acquire through lands purchased from willing sellers and donations of conservation easements.
This reserve protects lands threatened by development from expanding metropolitan areas and will provide habitat for “a wide range of species including waterfowl, shorebirds, forest-interior and grassland-dependent birds, and threatened and endangered species such as the dwarf wedgemussel, Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon, puritan and northeastern tiger beetles, and the northern long-eared bat,” according to the press release. The state of Maryland has lost half of its forests and wetlands since 1973. This designation marks the sixth new wildlife refuge created under Biden and Haaland’s leadership.
Just yesterday, Secretary Haaland visited Massachusetts to establish Nantucket Barrier Beach and Wildlife Refuge. Co-managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service with a set of NGOs, this refuge will protect rare ecological values and geological sites under the auspices of the national “Natural Landmarks” program, which “recognize and encourage the conservation of publicly and privately owned and managed places that contain noteworthy biological and geological resources.” Besides yesterday’s, Haaland has designated several more natural landmarks in her four years at the head of the Interior Department.
Also yesterday, Haaland announced her department would nominate the 400,000-acre Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The nomination will undergo a public review process before being formally submitted to the UN. According to the press release:
Okefenokee Swamp, a large hydrologically intact swamp that is the source of two rivers – one that flows into the Atlantic and the other into the Gulf of Mexico. It is one of the world's largest naturally driven freshwater ecosystems in the temperate zone with a diversity of habitat types, including 21 vegetative types. The refuge's undisturbed peat beds store valuable information on environmental conditions over the past 5,000 years and are a significant source of information related to global changes.
Biden has also been busy: signing declarations for new national monuments and cementing his legacy as the president who has set aside the most monuments in a single term since Jimmy Carter. Last week, Biden established the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. From the White House release:
The new national monument will tell the story of the oppression endured by thousands of Native children and their families at this site and the harmful legacy of the broader Indian boarding school system that the federal government operated or supported across the country for more than 150 years.
And, just a few days later, Biden dedicated the new Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine. According to the White House, this monument is meant to:
honor the historic contributions of America’s first woman Cabinet Secretary and the longest-serving Secretary of Labor.
Frances Perkins was the leading architect behind the New Deal and led many labor and economic reforms that continue to benefit Americans today. During her 12 years as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she envisioned and helped create Social Security; helped millions of Americans get back to work during the Great Depression; fought for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively; and established the minimum wage, overtime pay, prohibitions on child labor, and unemployment insurance.
Tribes and advocates with a wish list of several other monuments across the country continue to push Biden to designate them prior to leaving office.
Switching gears to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Biden team has just released its “restoration blueprint” for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. In the works since 2011, this plan revises how the sanctuary will be managed in the wake of concerning coral die-offs and other ecological challenges. It will become final on January 11. According to the agency’s website:
The clear, blue and turquoise waters of Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary contain part of the only coral barrier reef in the continental United States, the largest documented contiguous seagrass community in the Northern Hemisphere, mangrove-fringed shorelines, hard-bottom habitat, sand and mud flats, and an array of submerged historical and cultural resources. Each of the components of the 3,800 square-mile sanctuary are ecologically connected, requiring a comprehensive plan for restoring and managing the resources within these waters both individually and cohesively.
The new plan will increase the size of the sanctuary by 20%, will add more areas protected from cruise ship and oil tanker activity, and will set aside new bird and sea turtle management zones.
On the opposite coast, NOAA has announced it will maintain the current level of federal protections for four threatened salmon and steelhead species in Oregon and California. The agency, which manages marine and anadromous (ocean species that return to freshwater to breed) fish, is required to carry out a status review for threatened and endangered marine species every five years. NOAA reports that major impediments to recovery remain, but that necessary work to restore fish habitat across the west coast was carried out at a larger scale than previously possible due to funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It is expected to bear fruit in the coming decade.
Rounding out the year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released the results of its efforts to increase enforcement. The agency says in 2024, it doubled fines assessed against polluters to $1.7 billion, the highest in 7 years. It also carried out the first arrest of a person implicated in a climate-change crime: a man accused of smuggling HFCs across the border into the U.S. HFCs, a type of coolant gas, are potent greenhouse gases and are illegal to import into this country without EPA permits. Under the AIM Act of 2020, the U.S. has implemented a stepwise schedule to phase out HFC use starting January 1. EPA’s director said HFCs were a national enforcement priority as, “[a]longside methane, HFCs are one of the most significant near-term drivers of climate change.”
In 2024, EPA also settled a Clean Air Act violation with Cummins, Inc., a company that makes engines for Dodge Ram trucks. In a case that recalls the Volkswagen emissions scandal several years back, the engine maker was found to have installed software that allowed Ram trucks to evade diesel emissions tests. The settlement requires Cummins to pay $2 billion in penalties—the largest fines ever assessed under the Clean Air Act—and recall 600,000 trucks.
The enforcement program hired 300 new employees last year and was able to document and penalize a wider variety of violations, running the gamut from illegal factory emissions to toxic waste discharge.
In EPA pesticide regulation, the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has followed up last week’s proposed Endangered Species Act protections for the monarch butterfly (which Xerces spearheaded a decade ago) with a petition to EPA to require mandatory testing of all pesticides on honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies, and moths.
Currently, chemical companies must apply to EPA for a “registration” that allows them to sell their pesticides. They must submit research showing the impacts of their proposed chemical on “non-target insects,” for example, pollinating insects. Until now, the regulations have treated honeybees as proxies for all other pollinators. Because pesticides can affect various types of pollinating insects differently, this limited data set, showing only impacts to honeybees, has led to an incomplete picture of the harms from any given chemical. Requiring companies to submit testing data on a wider range of pollinators should give a more accurate understanding of pesticides’ impacts in the environment. Ideally, this would prevent those that harm native pollinators from being sold or used widely.
This petition to improve pesticide regulation is one part of Xerces’ larger conservation strategy that includes research on the harms of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, helping farmers and homeowners reduce their reliance on these and other chemicals, and seeking Endangered Species Act listings for individual imperiled insect species.
A final note for the longest night: Dark Sky International has named Cottonwood Canyon State Park in Oregon as an official Dark Sky Park. This was a collaborative effort over several years involving staff at Oregon State Parks along with the local brach of the dark sky nonprofit. They worked together to remove outdoor lighting on park buildings and educate campers to keep their lights low to preserve the incredible stargazing from the depths of this canyon along the John Day River. This is the third new dark sky designation for Oregon this year: the others include Oregon Caves National Monument and Oregon Outback Dark Sky Sanctuary.
Wishing you good rest and a peaceful holiday season.
Talk to you after the New Year,
Rebecca
Sources:
https://mountainjournal.org/eastern-shoshone-awarded-3-million-for-bison-restoration
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2024/12/18/haaland-in-talks-about-run-for-new-mexico-governor-00195104
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/18/nx-s1-5231827/bald-eagles-national-bird
https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2024-12/secretary-haaland-establishes-southern-maryland-woodlands-national-wildlife
https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-department-designates-massachusetts-site-national-natural-landmark
https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/okefenokee-national-wildlife-refuge-be-nominated-join-unesco-world-heritage-list
https://www.kunc.org/regional-news/2024-11-19/biden-has-designated-6-national-monuments-could-he-do-more
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/09/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-actions-and-historic-progress-supporting-tribal-nations-and-native-communities-ahead-of-fourth-annual-white-house-tribal-nations-summit
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/16/fact-sheet-president-biden-designates-frances-perkins-national-monument
https://floridakeys.noaa.gov/blueprint/
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/four-pacific-salmon-and-steelhead-retain-threatened-status-reviews-recovery-progress
https://www.courthousenews.com/epa-hails-revitalized-enforcement-efforts-as-biden-administration-heads-to-exit/
https://earthjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024-12-13-pollinator-data-reqts-petition-final.pdf
https://darksky.org/news/cottonwood-canyon-state-park/
*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.
You can reach me at fearlessgreen@substack.com
Thanks for sharing, it’s great to see so much positive news - including the announcement re funding for bison herds.
Thank you, Rebecca. Enjoy the yuletide.