Owl in America || February 6, 2025

Notes from an American environmentalist

“Owl in America” is a series of letters chronicling the Trump years from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. The first administration brought chaos to the framework of laws that protect America’s public lands and wildlife, only some of which was repaired during Biden’s term. These notes document today’s transformations in environmental policy and protections in areas ranging from wildlife and public lands to toxic substances and climate chaos.

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Jaguar in the Amazon; photo: Emmanuel Rondeau, World Wildlife Fund France

Hi all~

There are, of course, many reasons to regret the U.S. government’s choice to shut down its foreign aid agency, USAID. Beyond—just to pick a few from thousands of examples—funding treatment for 20 million people living with HIV worldwide, working to contain a new Ebola flare-up in Kampala, Uganda, and coordinating the response to bird flu outbreaks in 49 countries, USAID also funnels billions of U.S. dollars into projects intended to protect the future of life on Earth.

In The Revelator, John Platt reports that USAID funds support:

programs to reduce wildlife poaching and trafficking, tackle deforestation, assist environmental refugees, study animal populations in the wild, and protect people in critical habitats.

But to Musk, USAID is “hopeless” and deserves to be thrown “into the wood chipper.” Over the past few days Musk allies have bullied their way into USAID offices, accessed critical systems (and classified documents), hollowed out the agency’s leadership, turned off the agency’s website, and locked staff out of their headquarters. “We’re shutting it down,” Musk wrote on X.

Musk and his posse of youthful software engineers, even with Trump’s consent, cannot legally “shut down” any U.S. agencies created through acts of Congress and thus, only shutdown-able by Congress. Nevertheless, the usaid.gov website hosts only this banner image today.

Screenshot from usaid.gov taken Feb. 6, 2025

The first paragraph reads: “On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs. Essential personnel expected to continue working will be informed by Agency leadership by Thursday, February 6, at 3:00pm (EST).”

In the environmental context, among one of very many concerning outcomes, American promises to counter Amazon deforestation are now in serious question. One of a few bright spots in global forest action, USAID funding through Fundo Amazônia has played a major role in the recent steep decline of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. An intact Amazon rainforest will be necessary to combat global climate change. It is a critical reservoir for biodiversity and supports a wide range of indigenous and nonindigenous human lives.

The USAID Amazon fund works, in part, by providing good incomes for Brazilian farmers who agree not to clear native forest, leading to better outcomes for people, plants, and animals in the region. All that is up in the air now.

As a sanity check, though the absolute dollar amounts are massive, the percentage of U.S. spending on foreign aid each year is tiny. Here’s a useful memory device from writer Robin Sloan. Look at your hand, palm up, fingers spread. The palm and thumb together represent combined spending on healthcare and social security. One finger represents interest paid to service the national debt. Another finger is mandatory spending like government pensions and veterans’ benefits. A third finger is defense.

The final finger (your pinky) represents everything else. Tellingly, we classify that as ‘nondefense spending.’

Source: Robin Sloan, drawn from Congressional Budget Office

As Sloan puts it, “The joke is that ‘everything else’—education, foreign aid, the FDA, FEMA, you name it — is encapsulated in your pinky finger. Fourteen percent of the federal budget in 2024.” To that list, I’ll add public lands, wildlife, and environmental protection. “Nearly 100% of grousing about government waste is aimed at items in that diminutive nondefense bucket, & in that way, it is totally unserious.”

So, for anyone tempted to speculate whether environmental protection budgets are bloated, I’d point out that virtually all of it—from USAID’s critical overseas work to domestic endangered species recovery programs to federal climate research—fits within that wee nondefense pot, of which it is, in turn, just a very little part.

USAID spends only about 4% of that pinky finger of ‘nondefense’ spending, and of that, only a portion is spent on environmental programs. From that vanishingly small sliver comes “a handful of examples of USAID’s recent environmental efforts,” compiled by journalist John Platt:

• In Tanzania, the $30 million Hope Through Action project — a collaboration with the Jane Goodall Institute — “aims to improve protection for key chimpanzee corridors and 2.5 million additional hectares, increase the incomes of 450,000 people, develop a National Youth Council and more.” (This includes efforts to foster “gender equality in land-ownership rights,” which makes it a target for Trump’s anti-DEI efforts.)

• USAID is one of the primary partners in the RISE program, which supports “Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Communities” by addressing gender-based violence as it connects to environmental and climate-related issues.

• The agency has helped train hundreds of wildlife rangers in Cambodia and other countries.

• USAID’s Saving Threatened Wildlife project has spent several years working to stop wildlife trafficking in Vietnam, with work on the national and provincial lessons. Most recently USAID trained tourism professionals in Quang Ninh Province, “equipping them with knowledge, tools, and strategies to discourage tourist purchases of illegal wildlife products” such as elephant ivory.

• The agency has also helped to fight deforestation in Vietnam to conserve biodiversity and alleviate poverty, and carried out the country’s largest camera-trap survey, which revealed wildlife population declines across Vietnam.

• A project in Papua New Guinea “facilitated the development of a conservation deed to protect the endangered Western Pacific leatherback sea turtle and preserve the rights of coastal communities.”

• The discovery of a new orangutan species in Indonesia several years ago only happened thanks to funding by USAID. More recently, this past December, the agency announced the U.S. and Indonesia were working together to “advance orangutan conservation” in a now-deleted press release.

• USAID funded local efforts in Bangladesh that helped reverse an endangered fish’s decline.

• Funding in the Philippines helped to “reduce poaching and use of illegally harvested wildlife species and byproducts, and improve ecosystem goods and services for human wellbeing.”

• The agency worked with several partners to document a biodiversity stronghold for endangered species in Cambodia, an effort that will help protect Asian elephants, dholes, sun bears, clouded leopards and other wildlife.

• Also in Cambodia, the agency’s Wonders of the Mekong project that has helped conservation efforts of the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish.

• In 2022, during the height of the COVID pandemic, USAID and several other organizations organized meetings to develop strategies to minimize the risk of future zoonotic disease outbreaks, one of many efforts in this area.

• In Madagascar USAID invested “nearly $80 million” by November 2023 “to help communities mitigate and adapt to climate change, manage and benefit from their natural resources, create environmentally friendly livelihoods, combat wildlife trafficking, and prevent deforestation.” (The official web page about this has been removed, but it’s still accessible through Archive.org’s Wayback Machine.)

• In Mozambique a multiyear effort by USAID has “encouraged prosecutors and judges to prosecute wildlife crimes, ending poachers’ impunity.” (Wayback Machine link.)

• The agency organized workshops in Ghana to engage people from the finance and transportation sectors to address wildlife crime.

• USAID has worked with airlines to fight illegal wildlife trafficking through its ROUTES partnership, which stands for Reducing Opportunities for Unlawful Transport of Endangered Species.

• In Liberia the agency worked with a local youth organization to hold a national conference on conservation and sustainability.

• USAID worked with the Journalists Environmental Association of Tanzania to hold a meeting on biodiversity conservation and encourage more coverage of wildlife in the media.

• The agency helped fund efforts that discovered an amazing small boa species in the Dominican Republic.

• And USAID funds the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a critical tool for predicting humanitarian and ecosystem crises, which has been offline since the U.S. froze foreign aid.

Regarding the list above, Platt says: “This just scratches the surface—hundreds of additional examples both large and small existed on USAID’s now-shuttered website (and can still be found on other sites they haven’t figured out how to delete or turn off yet).”¹

And that’s just the environmental work USAID does. What about its efforts to contain the avian flu outbreaks now happening in a full quarter of the world’s nations? Its education, feeding, relief, and healthcare initiatives overseas? It is beyond mind boggling.

Sloan’s right: what Musk is doing to USAID and elsewhere is “totally unserious” in terms of actually cutting America’s spending. It’s a power play and money grab (flavored with perhaps a bit of revenge for USAID’s anti-apartheid work in his home country of South Africa).

According to European diplomat and writer Alexander Verbeek, Musk has accumulated far more wealth since the November 2024 elections than USAID’s entire annual budget. Studying the rise of European fascism, he sees this as a tactic from the authoritarian playbook: first attack those who are the farthest from the ‘heartland,’ i.e., non-Americans overseas who are, in relative terms, powerless and poor. This group includes the nonhuman world. He warns, though, that

. . . such policies never remain distant for long. Already, the ripples are reaching American shores. In the heartland, farmers who fell for the promise to make America great again now face the harsh reality that their produce no longer has a guaranteed buyer in USAID's food aid programs. These real Americans face real consequences, just like countless other Americans whose income is related to USAID's activities.

Of course, what happens to the beleaguered lands and lives of the ‘global south’ or anywhere on planet Earth will reach American shores, and not even the billionaires will be exempt from the consequences.

Legal analyst Susan Crawford highlights climate scientist James Hansen’s alarming conclusions in a recent paper, authored with 16 other researchers from NASA, Columbia University, and the University of California. Global temperatures leapt more than 0.4 degrees Celsius in the past two years; “many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño.”

Hansen and co-authors believe current climate models (such as that relied on by the UN) systematically undercount the impacts of aerosols on cloud formation and cooling. The authors expect an increase in polar ice melt above that predicted by the standard models. The result would be a shutdown of the AMOC (the Atlantic current that, broadly speaking, distributes heat from the southern hemisphere to the north) in 20-30 years, bringing about a cataclysmic effect on global climate. They write that the IPCC’s best estimates for future temperature rise “are not consistent with observed warming.”

The paper, published just a few days ago, is titled “Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?” I’d say not.

I can’t escape the imagery of half-insane billionaires looting Rome while it burns. Many would say it’s past time for the American empire to fall like Rome once did. Fair enough, but how many other lives will that demise take along with it?

Talk to you soon,
Rebecca

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Sources:

https://therevelator.org/usaid-trump-climate-extinction

https://www.usaid.gov

https://therevelator.org/trump-amazon-deforestation/

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/winter-reading/

https://theplanet.substack.com/p/first-they-came-for-usaid

https://susanpcrawford.substack.com/p/james-hansen-says-were-underestimating

Hansen, J. E., et al. (2025). Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67(1), 6–44.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494

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*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.

You can reach me at fearlessgreen@substack.com

1. Calling out the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine here again for your consideration and support. It has already become the only publicly available source for many shuttered government and media websites. https://archive.org