The Environmental Movement Needs to Touch Grass

Donald Trump is the most anti-environment president since “environmentalism” emerged in America. He has rescinded the “endangerment finding,” meaning that the government no longer accepts the basic truth that climate change is bad for people. He is rolling back regulations that would have protected American skies and waters from pollutants such as mercury, arsenic, “forever chemicals,” soot, and methane. And he is working to demote conservation as a priority use for the 245 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.The environmental movement—green-minded politicians, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, writers, volunteers, and advocacy organizations—has seemed ill-equipped to respond. Environmental-news headlines get little attention, court challenges play out in obscurity, and when people do protest, our air, water, forests, and oceans seem like afterthoughts amid so many other worthy causes.How did the movement lose its vibrancy? More screen time, less wild habitat available to visit, and a shift to urban living have made Americans less viscerally connected to the splendor of planet Earth. Even conservation scientists have been trapped indoors, thanks to the falling cost of crunching large quantities of data (much of which is gathered by satellite) relative to the high cost of the travel, staff, and equipment required to observe plants and animals in the field. From 1980 to 2014, conservation research papers based on fieldwork dropped by 20 percent whereas research done by data analysts and modellers rolling around in cubicles increased by at least sixfold.[From the December 2025 issue: What climate change will do to America by mid-century]But another factor is at play. For more than 30 years, I have worked at the intersection of economics and conservation at organizations such as Resources for the Future, Conservation International, and the Conservation Strategy Fund, which I founded. What I have seen in recent years is that the environmental mov