About the Owl

Owl in America is a series of letters written from inside the unraveling of U.S. environmental governance. Drawing on the author's decades of work in public service—as a biologist, an environmental lawyer, and a witness to how laws, agencies, and courts function in practice—the series documents the second Trump era as it reshapes public lands, wildlife protections, climate policy, and the institutions meant to safeguard the commons. These essays track not only what is being dismantled, but how: through administrative capture, legal erosion, disinformation, privatization, and the steady hollowing of democratic constraints.

The series resists both despair and false reassurance. It journeys into analysis of political power, but always returns back to land, ecology, history, and moral responsibility. What does human stewardship means in an age of accelerating extraction and authoritarian drift? The through-line is paying attention: to systems, to language, to human experience, and to the fragile threads that still connect people, law, and the living world. These letters invite us to stay informed and connected while the ground shifts beneath our feet.

Owl at the Library is an occasional series that follows a self-assigned experiment in reading through a small-town library’s nonfiction collection. I use the Dewey Decimal system as a guide to move shelf by shelf across unfamiliar subjects and explore what happens when reading choices are shaped by external structure rather than personal taste.

These letters are written by a human and not an AI, and thus may contain typos, errors, or subpar writing. Readers should feel free to reach out with suggestions or corrections. I pledge to take the time to research and respond to gentle missives.