opinion
For those who came of age in the 1970s, it’s been especially painful to watch the Trump administration relentlessly roll back hard-won environmental progress. But amid increasing attacks on clean air, water and endangered species, a leading ecologist has found reason for hope.
Civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment have always been my main concerns, and I have lived through a time of great progress. I remember watching everything from Selma to Earth Day as a kid. Some of the people working on the demolition must have been watching the progress. You have to be at least 70 years old to remember the protests, the music, the three assassinations that permanently weakened America, the immoral war that used our classmates as firewood, and the struggle to close or widen the divide that divided us.
But the policy victory was great. As an environmental science student in the 1970s, I was thrilled to see major legislation being signed into law. Clean Air Act. Clean water law. Hazardous Substances Control Act Endangered Species Act. Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. America understood the problem. America cared. America was repairing broken and contaminated pipes that would leak in the future. my future. And America was leading the world by example.
And now things are going backwards. I’ll briefly review a few things below to illustrate the point.
After the EPA issued emissions limits in 2024, mercury concentrations in fish began to decline. That measure was rescinded in February.
Living on the Atlantic coast, I fish and eat my catch. Mercury has long been a concern. My blood levels are sometimes high. Mercury is an impurity found in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Coal chimneys are a source of mercury in fish. In 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued air quality standards that cut emissions of mercury by 90 percent and emissions of other metals by 80 percent. Mercury levels in fish have begun to fall. In 2024, the EPA further strengthened these rules and set even stricter limits. However, in early 2026, the EPA rescinded the 2024 standards, allowing more mercury and metals to be released into the atmosphere. The Trump administration extended subsidies, issued orders to support our coal-burning comrades, and exempted 68 coal-fired power plants from complying with mercury standards for two years. Burning coal produces a toxic sludge called coal ash, which is also regulated. But in 2026, the EPA announced it would ease oversight and extend cleanup of coal ash sites for up to three years.
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In February, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the reversal of the agency’s 2009 findings, so-called “endangered findings,” that found greenhouse gases cause climate change and endanger human health. Emissions will no longer be regulated. Among other things, this ends the basis for tailpipe carbon standards for cars and trucks. EPA’s authority to regulate these emissions had been affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2007. Like many other things, it is of little importance now.
Demonstrators gather for the first Earth Day at Independence Mall in Philadelphia, April 22, 1970.
Associated Press
The administration also ordered a halt to fully permitted wind projects, and leases for offshore wind turbines off the East Coast were also cancelled. Courts have repeatedly rejected the “national security” excuse. “This is not a wind issue. This is a rule of law issue for any capital-intensive energy project on federal waters or land,” one energy analyst said of these cancellations without due process.
The White House also issued an executive order in early 2026 to increase production of glyphosate, a controversial herbicide used in Roundup and other agricultural pesticides. As always, the reason is “national defense.” The battle over glyphosate resulted in a nearly $300 million victory in the United States against glyphosate manufacturer Monsanto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the plaintiff’s attorney against Monsanto in that case and now our nation’s Secretary of Health, performed a spin worthy of an ice skating gold medal and praised the EPA for protecting “our nation’s defense preparedness and food supply.” Glyphosate maker Bayer may begin paying $7.25 billion to resolve tens of thousands of claims that Roundup caused cancer. But the Supreme Court may soon come to the pesticide maker’s side, even though a major 2000 paper announcing the herbicide was safe despite links to cancer was retracted in February after Monsanto appeared to have been secretly involved in the study.
When I was 12 years old, I caught a bluefin tuna (my tuna are babies and can weigh up to 1,500 pounds). I was shocked by its strength and beauty.
As we have known since Rachel Carson’s monumental book Silent Spring in 1962, pesticides and agriculture affect birds. I have worked to raise, train, research, write about, and protect birds from my childhood to today. Bird populations continue to decline across the United States and in the tropics, and the rate of decline is accelerating. North America has lost a third of its birds since I was in high school. The main driving force is agricultural expansion and its practices. In South America, birds are declining even in intact forests, likely due to changes in climate and moisture patterns.
Defending biodiversity: Why it’s important to protect species from extinction. read more.
When I was 12 years old, I caught a bluefin tuna (my tuna are babies and can weigh up to 1,500 pounds). I was shocked by its strength and beauty. By the early ’90s, they had become a severely diminished animal on the US side of the Atlantic Ocean. Their range in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea has rapidly shrunk, disappearing from the North Sea and the British Isles. I set my sights on reversing their decline. In 1993, I published a cover article in Conservation Biology titled “Bluefin Tuna of the Western Atlantic: Neglectful Management and the Birth of an Endangered Species.” I subsequently petitioned for these species to be listed as endangered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. That should stop the exports that were causing their extinction. The threat of listing lowers catch limits and increases enforcement. Joined by top scientists and seasoned advocates, years of writing and more battles followed. Efforts to limit catches and enforce quotas have been so successful that by 2021 the Atlantic population, rated “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2011 and 2015, was rated “least concern.” The amazing turnaround is very evident in my home waters off the coast of New York. A stunning success in policy and international cooperation.
Volunteers clean up a beach near Santa Barbara after the infamous January 1969 spill.
Photo courtesy of UPI/Bettman Archive/Getty Images
In 2025, recreational catches exceeded quotas and the federal fisheries agency closed the fishery by August. Fishermen complained. So in early 2026, in what could be called Operation Rogue, Rogue, Rogue Hour Boat, the United States announced to the International Atlantic Tuna Commission (an agreement to which the United States is a party and is bound) that the United States would no longer count very large recreational catches toward quota limits. The US announcement was quickly challenged by several environmental groups, including Japan, Canada, the European Union, and myself. This species is clearly very sensitive and its population responds to both high and low fishing pressure. I don’t want to go back to the bad old days. I’ll try again.
These are just a few of the many things that go back. If you would like a very partial Federal Register addition or update to a recent U.S. federal decision, search the Internet for “environmental rollback” or “conservation rollback.” My notes are just a hobby.
One more thing. The Trump administration this week immediately removed oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from consideration under the Endangered Species Act. With oil prices soaring due to the war with Iran, the administration created a “God Squad” with the power to decide whether a species lives or dies, falsely claiming that the Endangered Species Act was somehow blocking the flow of domestic oil.
Times have changed, but the imperatives of human dignity, a life worth living, and the needs of nature remain the same.
In fact, because of this law, the United States pumps more oil than any other country. Despite focusing solely on preventing extinction rather than ensuring abundance, the law has proven time and time again over the past half-century that it does little to actually impede the accomplishment of the task and is important in preventing unnecessary extinction. Having witnessed and documented the summer chaos in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon oil explosion in 2010, I can say that the Gulf, its fishing and tourism economy, and endangered whales and turtles don’t need an excuse for carelessness in oil drilling.
I don’t know America now, and neither does anyone else. The two-party system context has always provided a precarious stability, but now it is volatile. The presidency shifts between diametrically opposed positions from term to term, and Congress flips, convulses, and freezes. We don’t know who we are, and we can’t decide.
Beyond “crisis”: Finding a way for America to move forward on climate change. read more.
It is said that it will not work if the family is divided. One wonders where all the unraveling will lead us in terms of the things I have always cared about and rights, the simplicity of non-white people, non-human creatures, healthy air and water.
But those struggles have been going on for centuries and will never go away. Times have changed, but the imperatives of human dignity, a life worth living, and the needs of nature remain the same. The good thing about bad times is that times change and things get better. And if all of history is any indication, change will come.
