Owl in America || January 30, 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. It remains to be seen whether the increased preparedness of incoming policy-makers will result in increased efficacy at dismantling the executive agencies that administer these lands and protections. These notes will document that transformation.
So, a few things happened last week. The U.S. has a new president and my inbox is bursting with legal analyses of his first flurry of actions. I’m not entirely joking when I say that one of the things I’ll miss most about the Biden administration is the comparatively slow pace of news emerging from Washington, D.C., each week.
As expected, the Trump administration has again brought the United States into alignment with “a handful of failed or war-torn states, including Libya, Iran and Yemen” in rejecting the Paris Climate Accords. In rather unfortunate timing, this announcement coincides with confirmation that the 1.5°C limit envisioned by the accords was consistently breached in 2024. The average temperature last year was 1.6°C above preindustrial levels.
The next obvious question is whether the Paris agreement has been ‘working,’ anyway, given it originated in 2016 and its limit has already been exceeded. Many would argue it has not.
Still, according to 2023’s Stocktake Report—an evaluation of progress required by the accords—as a result of global climate action we’ve seen a significant reduction in expected temperature increases by 2100.
In 2010, the expected global increase by 2100 was 3.7–4.8°C.
In 2015, with the adoption of the Paris agreement, the expected global increase declined to 3.0–3.2°C.
In 2022, at COP 27, further terms reduced the expected temperature increase to 2.4–2.6°C.
While better than 4.8°C, a world at 2.4°C above preindustrial average temps is still a world unlike any humanity has ever seen. We are getting hints of it now, at 1.6°C. The parade of weather disasters, induced or worsened by climate change, just since I started this series in late 2024 boggles the mind. Massively destructive typhoons, one after the other in the Philippines, atmospheric rivers in northwestern North America, heartrending fires in Los Angeles . . . and just the month before, we saw catastrophic flooding in Valencia, Spain, and the onslaught of Hurricane Helene in the southeastern U.S. It’s been a year.
If I take anything from a review of whether the Paris Accords are effective, it’s that we can at least cobble together international action to mitigate warming. 2024 has, however, just proven that we will not keep warming under 1.5°C. The departure of the U.S. from the agreement will certainly not help the world achieve any new temperature goalpost we set going forward.
Analysts point out that global progress can be made with or without the United States. At Azerbaijan’s 2024 global climate conference:
a coalition conspicuously lacking the United States has committed to an “ambitious” new climate initiative. The coalition comprises the EU plus eleven countries including the UK, Norway, Canada, and Mexico. They’ll set new climate targets that include all greenhouse gases and every sector of their economies, which previous plans omitted. They’ve agreed to chart a “steeper line,” or at least a straight one, toward net-zero by 2050. (Fearless Green)
This points to a hard truth I think we’d do well to acknowledge: what the U.S. government does is now, for all intents and purposes, completely out of the hands of regular people. We have to think like the breakaway coalition at the Azerbaijan climate conference and go around the U.S. federal government in our environmental work.
Inasmuch as we ever had a say in Washington, that is no longer the case for the foreseeable future. By this, I don’t mean we should all just give up and let it burn. We should reach out to those federal leaders that represent us more directly—our Congresspeople—and express our opinions. Some of them will still be responsive, still be fighting, still triangulating to achieve a good outcome for America and the world.
But leaders of the executive branch are (arguably) no longer even trying to appear responsive to their own voter base. The executive is certainly not interested in the opinions of those who did not support this presidency.
This era is going to represent a dire test of the third branch of government, our judiciary. Not every issue will make it to the Supreme Court, which can no longer be trusted to act as a bulwark against executive overreach, meaning decisions in the lower courts will matter. For now, there are still many federal judges in the district and appeals courts who will resist the oligarchic agenda. Some older federal judges have delayed their retirements in order to stand firm and prevent their seats being filled by Trump appointees.
The Biden administration saw the confirmation of 235 judges to lifetime federal appointments, more even than Trump’s unprecedented first-term totals. These new Biden appointees will offer some resistance to the current administration’s plans, as will those long-serving jurists from more reasonable decades past. The new administration will have fewer vacancies to fill than it did in 2016, which is a small silver lining.
Nonprofit, public-interest organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity have already filed suit in opposition to various recent executive orders and actions, including the establishment of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE (now subsumed within the U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service). Finding an issue that matters to each of us personally and supporting a nonprofit group that is working on it in the courts is one tangible action that can actually be effective now. Much will rest in the hands of judges and their ability to enforce their rulings.
Beyond that, with the federal government politically out of reach to environmentalists until the next election cycle, another focus for activism is in the state and local arena. It’s not guaranteed, but state and local government processes sometimes remain amenable to citizen input.
I’ve lost count of the beige auditoriums and grayish conference rooms I’ve idled in, as a daylong agenda advances glacially toward the topic I’m there to speak on. Rough fabric-padded metal chairs, excessive air-conditioning, burnt coffee in giant urns—there’s always a lot going on, and none of it soothing to the nervous system. Add to that the endless droning on dull topics on a weekday when most people have many better places to be, and it’s easy to see why so few have the time or inclination to participate.
This is the work of civic government, and in my opinion, effective activism requires interested citizens to take part in it.
Instead, who does? Paid lobbyists, mostly, and sometimes a few miserably compensated nonprofit staffers or volunteers, if they can get a break in their schedules. Occasionally, depending on how NIMBY the issue is, a phalanx of retirees will descend on the meetings, too.
County or state-level agencies make many of the decisions that determine how local lands, waters, and wildlife are managed, far more than most people realize.
For example, most decisions impacting America’s wildlife are made by the states, even when those animals live on federal land. A quirk of our federal system has left to the individual states primary control of wildlife within their borders. The Commerce Clause gives the U.S. government the ability to regulate endangered species and migratory birds, for example, but beyond that, state governments handle most of it.
Typically, each state has a wildlife agency that carries out its programs and a fish and wildlife commission that issues the rules and regulations under which the agency operates. These bodies, usually not elected but appointed by the governor, control such matters as hunting and trapping quotas, restrictions on killing methods and ammunition, and when and whether lethal predator control will be used on behalf of ranchers.
In my experience in dull conference rooms along the west coast from Seattle to San Diego, the vast majority of attendees at any given state fish and wildlife commission meeting are those with a direct—often financial—interest in killing wildlife. This group includes ranchers, sport hunters,1 trappers, and frequently arms and ammunition vendors. Depending on the wildlife species at issue, a few environmental advocates and/or volunteers may be there to speak on behalf of the animals. Still, especially in the case of predators like wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions, almost all the voices in any given wildlife commission meeting will encourage policies that lead to more killing.
One quick way to find out what decisions are being made in your state—and by whom—is to do a web search to discover the name of your state’s wildlife commission. For example, I entered the search terms ‘North Carolina fish and wildlife commission’ and was directed to the page for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (it’s called something different in every state).
Open meeting laws require state commissions to make their decisions in a public forum and take citizen testimony. For the NC example, there was an announcement on the home page about an upcoming meeting along with the agenda of items to be considered, plus all the background information the agency had collected for the commissioners.
Clicking on a random agenda for a recent meeting, I saw that the North Carolina commission was considering whether to change the rules for how often animal trappers must check their traps statewide, to exempt certain types of lethal traps from a requirement that trappers check them for captured animals every 24 hours. The commissioners also had to decide whether to shorten or move the season for wild turkey hunting, given turkey reproduction is showing “long-term declines and have reached all-time lows,” according to the agency’s research.
These are just two among hundreds of these types of decisions made by wildlife commissioners across the country every day. And they are entry points into protecting something you love: if your passion were aquatic mammals like beavers and muskrats, you might want to participate in public meetings where animal cruelty issues such as trapping practices are being decided. Or perhaps turkeys are your jam, and you want to advocate for reduced hunting quotas so their populations can recover.
If you start attending commission hearings (many of which are now online), you’ll see which nonprofit organizations send staffers to advocate for the issues you care about. This can help you decide which group to support, if that’s something you’re interested in.
In the west, wildlife commissions make decisions about whether wolves will be killed for hunting cattle. In the north, they decide whether hunters are legally allowed to kill by running animals over with snowmobiles. Across the U.S., they decide whether barbaric practices like coyote-killing contests are allowed. All of these are areas where regular people can weigh in and—sometimes—be heard.
Similarly, state forestry commissions make important decisions about how forests within their boundaries are managed. This usually includes both state-owned forests and private/industrial forests, which state forestry laws cover. (National forests are managed under federal law.) This can provide an important opportunity for people to work on behalf of the land around them.
Even if we can’t control or have much input into how the federal government will manage federal lands and endangered species over the next few years, we can still be heard in our states and our towns. I think it’s worth it for everyone with an interest in the wild world (which is all of us, in truth) to keep an eye on what their state fish and wildlife commission is working on, as well as the state lands commission, the state forestry commission, if any, and each state’s environmental regulatory body. County commissioners and city councils will sometimes make decisions about our beloved places, too, so they’re worth watching.
Some argue, with justification, that even local and state processes are mostly lost to regular people. Environmental writer Max Wilbert quotes a paper published by Cambridge University explaining that “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” This is true at the federal level. It is also mostly true in state and local government. Even so, victories can be had at these smaller scales. Maybe it’s because people still see each other face-to-face there.
I believe that now is past time for any of us on the sidelines to pick a piece of land, or a wild plant or animal species, and devote the energy we might otherwise spend inveighing against the D.C. insanity to instead protecting what we love. How that looks depends on the defender—helping out a nonprofit group that shares our love, speaking at commission meetings, standing in the way of bulldozers—all are necessary, but not every person needs to do them all. We can meet like-minded people, set up a Friends group to watch over a patch of forest or a park or a species. We can keep track of what government decisions are in the offing that may impact our special place or animal friends, and go for it.
As individuals, we may not have power to affect federal and global environmental decisions at this time, but we can still be heard in our states and towns. The places, plants, and animals we love deserve our voices.
From writer
:Every day now, we each face a fork in the road. The choice of which direction is not “left” or “right,” as we've been trained to believe. But it is a choice between right or wrong, healing or destruction. There are so many lies being thrown at us every day now and intentional chaos. It’s like a virtual firestorm. But BE NOT AFRAID. Every day, you have a choice of which road to take.
Talk to you soon,
Rebecca
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/24/paris-climate-agreement-withdrawal-trump-world-response-us
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/10/world-temperature-in-2024-exceeded-15c-for-first-time
https://fearlessgreen.substack.com/p/owl-in-america-november-21-2024
https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/sb2023_09_adv.pdf
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-president-biden-secures-confirmation-235th-federal-judge
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5044373-federal-judges-delay-retirement-trump
https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/lawsuit-seeks-records-on-elon-musk-doges-role-in-trump-transition-2025-01-20
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/01/23/what-doge-actually-is-now-00200306
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/what-true-democracy-looks-like
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
https://www.ncwildlife.org/about/meetings
https://mariarodale.substack.com/p/a-fork-in-the-road
*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.
You can reach me at fearlessgreen@substack.com
To be clear, the ethical hunting community are typically powerful advocates for the natural world; however, the louder voices in wildlife policy circles are often from the more exploitative wing of the hunting industry and may include a subset of trophy hunters and ‘varmint’ hunters.
This is a very inspiring post! I'll be in Colorado most of this year and from what I've been told, the state F&W commissioners here are some of the best you'll find anywhere, in terms of wildlife protection. It helps that the governor's husband is an animal advocate too. The referendum to forbid trophy hunting of big cats failed, unfortunately, but wolf reintroduction is still happening.
We live within a National Forest on the edge of a protected federal wilderness. I am grateful we live in a blue state, but red gained ground in all but 2 counties in Nov. We live here because of the quiet, the access to solitude, dark skies and ample wildlife. Despite being in a blue state, the area I am in has mostly red representatives -state, county, and city - and they (along with 50% of the citizens) are fighting for a large mine on the edge of the wilderness and within its watershed.
Everyone focuses only on the water quality but I am also concerned for the old-growth forest, sensitive boreal ecosystems, and the assault from the lights, traffic, sounds, and dust that'll come with a large mine in a rural, remote area. I support groups that are fighting it, both in public and in court. I can understand that urban officials have no connection to Nature anymore. But local officials have lived here a long time, one of them has been a wilderness guide for many decades. How they can not want to protect it boggles my mind. It's going to be a long 4 years. At this point, I question whether we will ever return to a sane, normal way of governing. People are addicted to suffering and chaos. Watching people cheer for their own destruction is bizarre.
I agree we'll need to go around the govt. Not just with supporting causes but in building communities; building the way of life we want to see. It's a great way to have something positive to focus on. Here, we have a folk school that teaches traditional skills, and they are connecting people looking for a trade and skills-based economy. It's quite nice to spend time with like-minded people in a community atmosphere.