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 He has rescinded the “endangerment finding,” meaning that the government no longer accepts the basic truth that climate change is bad for people.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.
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 movement has become unmoored from nature for a reason of its own making: The movement has set its sights on the biggest environmental issue of all—climate change—but it has done so as if the planet’s climate is unrelated to its wild places. Nature is what gave the environmental movement its purpose, gave its founders their calling. Today it rides in the back seat. The environmental movement needs to find nature again—to fight for the planet’s ecosystems, plants, and wildlife—if it ever hopes to regain the power and purpose it once had.
Humans have stewarded the ecosystems that feed them for untold millennia, but as an American political movement, environmentalism started around the turn of the 20th century. John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt set out to protect awe-inspiring landscapes; Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and Minna B. Hall founded the first chapter of the Audubon Society to save birds imperiled by the use of their feathers to decorate hats. In the decades that followed, the country protected hundreds of millions of acres of public land. Writers such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson published eloquent ecological and scientific rationales for wilderness preservation, wildlife management, and pollution control, laying the intellectual groundwork for the late 1960s and early ’70s boom in environmental legislation.
When the issue of climate change emerged, it was initially viewed as just another environmental challenge, which environmental groups met with campaigns for national and international climate policies, all while still advocating for the preservation of wildlands.
But in this century, climate has shifted from one of many environmental issues to the dominant issue. Twenty percent of the environmental organizations started from 2000 to 2010 had climate in their name. In the next decade, that figure grew to 52 percent. I ran a conservation organization from 1998 to 2016, and saw that, at first, the climate issue elevated environmentalism, making it into a Serious Issue among diplomats, CEOs, and bankers. But after a while, climate eclipsed other environmental concerns such as land, water, wildlife, and local pollution; “climate” conceptually swallowed “environment.” Today’s New York Times coverage of nature-related issues, for example, is tucked away in a section that readers can access from the “U.S.” or “World” menus by clicking on “Climate.” Once there, the heading broadens to “Climate and Environment.” Running wilderness or ocean-preservation stories under that rubric, as the Times often does, is like putting baseball news in a section called “Football and Sports.”
Nature-conservation work hasn’t stopped, but it has become more climate-driven. Funding for forest protection in the Amazon expanded dramatically in the late 2000s and early 2010s, with the overwhelming majority of new money coming from Norway and Germany, whose primary motivation was keeping the trees standing so that their carbon content wouldn’t be released into the atmosphere. Long-standing conservation efforts in wetlands, grasslands, mangroves, kelp beds, and forests—in the U.S. and elsewhere—were rebranded as “nature-based solutions” to climate change.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Climate change is, as Barack Obama said, more than a big environmental issue; it’s the “issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” Those of us in the conservation corner of the broader environmental movement couldn’t ignore climate change; wild species are even more vulnerable than humans. Look no further than the near-certain demise—even under best-case warming scenarios—of basically all of the world’s warm-water coral reefs and their various colorful fish. Plus, intact ecosystems slow down the process of warming. We hoped funders would acknowledge that value and help close a global financial shortfall for nature protection, now estimated at $700 billion a year.
But the climate solutions that attract the most attention and investment have little to do with nature. Globally, investment in “energy transition” hit $2.3 trillion last year, up 8 percent from 2024 and 10 times the amount spent on “nature-based solutions.” Much of that $2.3 billion represents investments in businesses that sell equipment; investors expect to get their money back with a return. That’s hard to do with nature, though we’ve tried just about everything. My first job out of graduate school was to look into the economic potential for pharmaceuticals sourced from forests to pay for the protection of those ecosystems. That flopped, as have all subsequent attempts to protect nature permanently and on a large scale through the use of markets. So nature conservation still gets done with scarce government and philanthropic money.
Some prominent climate thinkers even explicitly promote solving our carbon problem so that we can comfortably expand humanity’s material footprint, albeit at nature’s expense. “Decarbonization” became the American policy approach of choice starting in the mid 2010s. The idea is to produce everything people want without emitting greenhouse gases. Instead of reining in consumption—and the extraction of natural resources that it requires—decarbonization advocates hope to merely reduce the climate pollution that extraction causes. In an interview about his 2022 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates said that curtailing consumption to eliminate carbon emissions is of limited value. “The primary plan has to be multiplying by zero” emissions per unit of consumption, he said—something that would be achieved via technological breakthroughs. The Microsoft founder doubled down on a pro-growth, tech-driven, nature-free approach in a 2025 essay, in which forests, biodiversity, and nature weren’t mentioned, either as climate casualties or remedies. Admittedly, Gates’s voice is just one in the environmental movement, but his is louder in the public square, and arguably more influential, than those of career environmental leaders, activists, and scientists who have a broader view of the problem.
Decarbonization is also the main environmental idea of the “abundance movement,” in part because it pragmatically avoids asking people to make material sacrifices. As Derek Thompson wrote in this magazine in 2022, “By going all-out on clean energy—solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and beyond—Americans can power more luxurious lives, free of the guilt that their luxury is choking the planet.” Going all-out, Thompson and his co-author, Ezra Klein, wrote in their 2025 book, Abundance, is mainly about, at least as far as climate is concerned, removing regulatory obstacles to building green-energy infrastructure.
Their thinking addresses a number of important, mostly non-environmental, social goals, and touches a nerve in many of us who have seen needless bureaucracy stop good things. But even if cutting “green tape” does unleash widespread decarbonization, the approach is a woefully incomplete answer to our environmental predicament. It reduces the complex physical and biological system that is our Earth to a mere carbon processor, ignoring the vulnerability of nature’s other gifts, such as fresh water and 8.5 million wild species, many of whose populations are already crashing. Solving for just one variable—carbon—will still leave the planet choking on mining waste and other pollution caused by producing the goods and services of those more luxurious lives.
Decarbonization is a necessary environmental goal, but letting it overshadow more relatable ecological causes is a strategic blunder. Getting the carbon out of buildings, factories, and transportation infrastructure provides no awe, no spiritual elevation, no invitation for humans to reflect on the marvel that is our planet. Decarbonization is a six-syllable mouthful about subtracting something invisible from our lives. How do you build a movement around that? By pairing it with nature.
People protect what they know and love. The environmental high point of the past year for me was when Western politicians, led by Republican Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana and backed by constituents across the political spectrum, thwarted Senator Mike Lee’s plans to sell off public lands. The MAGA-aligned hunter and influencer Cameron Hanes delivered a searingly straightforward explanation of how these natural lands make all sorts of people healthy and happy. A close second was on Earth Day, when several Republicans from Florida and at least one from Pennsylvania rebelled against their party’s bill to water down the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Representative Anna Paulina Luna said on social media, “Don’t tread on my turtles. Protected means protected.” Representative Kat Cammack defended the coastline in her district of Florida: “I want to make sure that we’re doing everything that we can to be the best stewards as possible.”
Zinke, Hanes, Luna, and Cammack are part of the environmental movement, too, though they might bristle at the label. They’re sending a message to the rest of us that we should stitch the atmosphere and the biosphere back together in our advocacy. Most nature-focused organizations I know of have already started, creating programs that acknowledge the benefits of healthy ecosystems to climate stability, and vice versa. But reciprocal gestures are rare among climate-focused groups.
This makes no sense scientifically—or politically. Climate is hugely divisive and nature isn’t. In a 2025 poll, a 50-percentage-point gap, 84–34, separated Democrats and Republicans on the question of whether the U.S. should “take a more active role in global climate efforts.” Support for “conservation lands and wildlife,” however, was 80 percent among Dems and 61 percent among Republicans. People of all stripes, it turns out, run, hike, bike, collect firewood and food in the wild. Ninety-six million Americans bird-watch, 58 million fish, and 14 million hunt.
“If you get down to the local level, genuine bipartisan collaboration can happen because there are people on both sides of the proverbial aisle who really care about the places that they live,” Michelle Nijhuis, the author of Beloved Beasts, which chronicles the history of the American conservation movement, told me.
This kind of collaboration should be channeled to expand publicly accessible natural lands. Call it an “environmentalism of places,” in which people take care of ecosystems near them for the good of plants, animals, water, and human psychological well-being. Climate advocates can refer to these very real, locally known places to make climate change real and relevant to people.
An environmentalism of places would also restore wild populations. As I’ve written previously in this magazine, the loss of wild abundance is an acute, potentially irreversible environmental crisis that’s moving fast. People connect with animals. We want to see their faces, hear birdsong, have plentiful game and fish—not just walk through pretty, empty landscapes. The Endangered Species Act has been highly effective at preventing extinction. We need additional national policies that bring back and protect wild abundance, not just existence.
In the climate arena, nature-aware policy means lowering emissions by all means possible, including industrial decarbonization, and protecting ecosystems such as forests, mangroves, and kelp beds that absorb carbon in large quantities. It means using adaptive measures such as seawalls and air-conditioning as a last resort, not a way to loosen our emissions budgets. And it means incentivizing people to downsize our consumption, which, no matter how green, makes material demands on the Earth.
For me, it also means putting down my screen for a while, going outside, getting my feet wet in grass still damp from a May rain, following the trill of an orange-crowned warbler to a buckeye tree just opening its spears of white blossoms, and getting a look from the tiny yellow bird that seems to ask, Where have you been?
