November 14, 2024

Owl in America is a series of letters tracing the actions of the current U.S. administration from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. These notes follow how, in a time of rapid political and ecological change, governmental decisions are felt in the living world.

Hi all~

Wild weather (and not just the American political landscape) dominates world headlines today. Eastern and southern Spain, including Valencia, are enduring another round of heavy rainfall after last week’s deadly floods, with evacuations ordered and schools closed. The Philippines have ordered mass evacuations as so-called Super Typhoon Usagi approaches. It’s designated a “super” typhoon because of its high sustained wind speeds, roughly comparable to a strong category 4 or 5 hurricane in the Atlantic. It’s the fifth typhoon to hit the Philippines in just a one-month period, and another typhoon is brewing on its heels in the Pacific. Across the world, Tropical Storm Sara is gathering strength in the Caribbean and is predicted to bring a risk of major flooding to Central America, with its path beyond that unclear.

Meanwhile, humans are debating whether and how to limit our collective greenhouse gas emissions and other measures to curb climate change at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP29. This year, the talks are being held at what climate activist Greta Thunberg calls the “beyond absurd” site of Azerbaijan, a country that she has called “an authoritarian petrostate.” Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev told attendees at the conference that oil and gas are a “gift of God.”

Visibly stunned Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama abandoned his planned speech and asked, “What on earth are we doing in this gathering? What does it mean for the future of the world if the biggest polluters continue as usual?”

I feel stunned, too. The COP29 climate conference seems like a farce, especially because the United States’ next president will almost certainly pull our country out of the talks going forward. And while the U.S. is no longer the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, its leadership has been seen as crucial. World action on climate change seems dead in the water, and here in the U.S., our next four years will be helmed by a climate-change denier and unapologetic supporter of polluting industries. It’s bleak.

If I’m ever tempted to write off the future of a livable planet for us and our fellow inhabitants, I remind myself that conservation relies on people at every level of governance and leadership and happens at every scale. And perhaps even more crucially, when people stop the destruction, life itself has the capacity to rebound and solve many of “our” problems.

Here’s an illustration. Yesterday, the Wiyot Tribe of northern California reacquired a 357-acre parcel of land on a peninsula in Humboldt Bay. Called Digawututklh, “lungs,” because “it breathes life into [Wiyot] ceremonies,” this bit of land served for millennia as a gathering place for travelers departing in redwood dugout canoes to destinations along the Pacific coast. Rich in foods tended by human inhabitants of small villages sheltered in the towering dunes, this highly biodiverse place developed where the southernmost extent of coastal Sitka spruce and shore pine forest meets dunes, estuary, wetlands, and open surf. Huckleberries, clams, and surf fish were generous food sources until European settlers took the land.

Its colonial history includes having all its human inhabitants and much of the forest cover cleared to make room for a lumber baron’s extensive hunting dog kennels. At some point, the land, now called Dog Ranch, became the property of Simpson Paper Company (a subsidiary of mega-deforester Simpson Timber Co.) and was later advertised for sale in the early 2000s. Area NGOs were in talks with the corporate owner and state agencies to purchase the property for conservation when a billionaire swooped in with a higher offer. The local paper reported at the time:

“They got in second place!” [the billionaire buyer] said, making no effort to conceal his glee. “And it'll never, ever, ever, ever, ever be sold to them. I'm not going to give it to the government agencies. I believe there’s far too much government land.” (North Coast Journal)

Nine years later, his winning glee seemed to have cooled, and he placed the parcel on the market. A wide coalition of nonprofit groups along with California and federal agencies raised the funds to purchase it, and it was placed under the management of a tiny organization called Friends of the Dunes with the intention that they’d pass it into permanent stewardship in time.

That day came yesterday when the Friends officially transferred Digawututklh into the care of the Wiyot tribe’s community land trust, which will permanently preserve and restore the place for human and nonhuman keeping. The land and wildlife there have already started to recover in the years since Friends of the Dunes took stewardship. Its temporary name, Dog Ranch, will fade into a blip—a brief period of violence and scarring by invaders from another continent—and the people who cared for it for thousands of years can look forward to doing so for thousands of years more. 

The “billionaire buyer” in the story above is named Rob Arkley, but his competitive drive to win and acquire just for the sake of winning and acquiring seems echoed in our favorite billionaire, Elon Musk, whom Trump has recently appointed to head a new Department of Government Efficiency. The open joke, of course, is that the agency’s acronym could be DOGE, referring to Musk’s reportedly preferred cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. 

Musk has promised to cut at least $2 trillion from federal spending, leaving us all to ask, from where? Heather Cox Richardson did a quick and dirty calculation in yesterday’s post: that’s about 30% of the total federal budget. Trump has said he either won’t cut or wants to increase spending in these areas: debt servicing and defense at about 26%, plus Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements at about 34%, altogether totaling about 60% of yearly outflows. The remaining 40%—from where the cuts would have to come—includes everything else, I suppose, such as public lands, wildlife, human health, agriculture, scientific research, highways and other infrastructure, air safety, regulatory work, education, and on and on. 

So, Musk wants to cut $2 trillion from the slightly less than $3 trillion currently being spent in those areas. We can only hope that Musk fails miserably at his first (hopefully, only) role in the government. 

Many “Friends” groups like the Friends of the Dunes mentioned above serve as nonprofit partners to federal agencies, taking on some of the management work for our public lands that our federal agencies lack the capacity to do, like rallying volunteers for beach cleanups, trail maintenance, and wildlife surveys.

I received an email from another such group, Friends of Black Rock High Rock, a few days ago, announcing the layoff of all paid staff due to loss of funding from their federal partnership with the Bureau of Land Management. This group has worked on behalf of the national conservation area of the same name in Nevada for 25 years, educating visitors about the rare desert habitats, hot springs, and fascinating geology of the ancient saline lake bed preserved in the Black Rock Desert. 

Another example of a nonprofit group that partners with land managers is Dark Sky International, which works around the globe to preserve the nighttime environment and protect human and nonhuman communities from light pollution. As part of its outreach, it works with national and local governments to dedicate lands as dark sky preserves or parks to raise awareness of the value of dark places and help guide funding toward keeping them free of nighttime light pollution.

Today, it declared a new Dark Sky Park at Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve in southwest Oregon. The National Park Service, under the umbrella of the Interior Department, manages Oregon Caves. Project 2025 looks to guide the incoming administration into making deep cuts to Interior.

In other public lands news, the U.S. Forest Service has announced that it will not be hiring any seasonal workers in 2025 because of budget cuts. It is hard to overstate the importance of seasonal employees to carrying out the agency’s mission: this workforce is thousands strong and carries out many of the agency’s most visible tasks, from working in visitor centers to staffing and cleaning campgrounds and fixing trails. They also do much invisible work like surveying fish populations in the nation’s streams and rivers, measuring snowpack, and monitoring endangered species. The hiring freeze will not apply to wildland firefighters.

In further lame duck news, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule two days ago that will levy large fees on oil and gas industries emitting methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term. Methane is estimated to be responsible for almost a third of global temperature rise since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The oil and gas industry is currently the largest emitter of methane in the United States. Policy observers question whether this new rule will withstand the next administration. 

In Alaska, Biden’s Department of the Interior has endorsed a land swap that could allow for a controversial road to be built across designated wilderness in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. Federal law prohibits road construction in wilderness areas, so the land swap would essentially remove a strip of land from the refuge in order to allow a road there.

Wilderness areas are designated by Congress, and major changes to their boundaries should only be made by Congress. If a department head in the executive branch successfully overrides this guardrail, then wilderness areas in Alaska and possibly across the U.S. may be in danger of presidential action to build roads across them. Roads are incredibly disruptive ecologically, fragmenting the landscape and reducing its wilderness “values.” They increase risk of wildfire and pollution. They can also allow access for extractive industries.

Originally approved during the first Trump administration in 2018, allied tribal and conservation pressure led Biden to withdraw the deal in 2023. 100-year-old former president Jimmy Carter, who signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) which protected the Izembek Refuge back in 1980, submitted a legal brief from his hospice bed last year. He urged Biden to reject the deal as a violation of the Act that could set a legal precedent for relaxing protections on other lands in Alaska. 

The road would connect an isolated village of fewer than 1000 people to an airport on the other side of Cold Bay. Opponents argue that hovercraft, helicopters, and ferries, already in operation, offer more reliable transportation options. Roads built across the permafrost are notoriously vulnerable to shifting and cracking. Mother Earth’s arguments against the road are likely as follows: 

In the spring and fall, virtually the entire population of emperor geese and Pacific black brant geese converge on the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, devouring its eelgrass beds before continuing their long migrations. In the winter, tens of thousands of Steller’s eider sea ducks stop there to molt. (Washington Post)

Southwest Alaskan tribes have filed over 20 resolutions against the deal on the grounds that the road will have major negative impacts on the wildlife that depend on the refuge. I am not clear on the current administration’s motives for endorsing the land swap and road construction, but the final decision will fall to Trump. His backers will likely urge him to direct his Secretary of the Interior to approve the deal because it may do just as former President Carter warned: weaken protections for other conservation lands across Alaska, many of which lie above rich mineral and petroleum resources.

Finally, a bright spot for reporting about coastal life: Hakai magazine, a well-regarded source for science and nature writing, has announced it will not completely close its doors in 2024 after losing its foundation backing earlier this year. Senior staff will be absorbed into bioGraphic, a publication of the California Academy of Sciences, which will expand its coastal reporting. Hakai’s publisher is currently crowdfunding $150,000 to bring the rest of the staff along.

For Americans looking for an action to take on behalf of Mother Earth this weekend, can I suggest researching what “Friends” groups are active in your area? They can be found working on behalf of our public lands across the country, from wildlife refuges to state parks to archaeological monuments, and all are likely to be in a bit of a panic right now. Reach out and offer support where you can, whether that’s your time, finances, or contacts. They may not know yet how best you can help, but keep them in your mind over the next several months and reach back out when possible. Very good public service work done by these groups is already faltering badly, and we can expect that to worsen.

For readers around the world, the last supermoon of the year, called the Beaver Moon in various Native American and European traditions, will be at its peak just after sunset on Friday, November 15. If you’re looking for a way to reconnect to your inner stillness in this time of chaos, you could do worse than spending some time outside gazing at our old friend Luna. There’s perspective there. 

Talk to you soon,
Owl

Sources:

https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2024-11-14-tropical-depression-nineteen-tropical-storm-sara-forecast-tracker

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/13/spain-flood-warnings-schools-closed-people-evacuated

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/12/cop29-baku-azerbaijan-un-climate-conference-2024/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqd1rzw9r4o

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/NewsBlog/archives/2024/11/13/wiyot-tribe-celebrates-return-of-digawututklh

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/NewsBlog/archives/2020/10/16/arkleys-dog-ranch-peninsula-property-sold-to-conservation-coalition

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/NewsBlog/archives/2014/10/31/arkleys-dog-ranch-on-the-market

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/042805/news0428.html

https://www.wiyot.us

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-13-2024

https://www.blackrockdesert.org/mission-and-vision

https://darksky.org/places/oregon-caves-national-monument-and-preserve/

https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-forest-service-is-cutting-its-seasonal-workforce-and-public-lands-will-suffer/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/12/methane-fee-epa-cop29/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/13/izembek-land-swap-road-alaska/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/14/supermoon-beaver-moon-friday/

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

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