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 using the Dewey Decimal system as a guide. Moving shelf by shelf across unfamiliar subjects, it explores what happens when curiosity is paired with constraint, and when reading is shaped not only by preference, but by structure. Posts reflect on overlooked corners of knowledge, the discipline of learning outside one’s interests, and the unexpected rewards of venturing beyond the well-trodden paths of personal taste.

These letters are written by a person alone 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. I will probably ignore ungentle ones.