Nature Is ‘Not for Sale’

Aggressive habitat fragmentation will follow the Trump administration’s and Senator Mike Lee’s frenzied and persistent attempts to sell millions of acres of public land.

More than 150 national forests and 20 national grasslands represent an astonishing range of ecosystems where much of our country’s biodiversity thrives. Collectively, they comprise the National Forest System, or NFS, for short.

For many Americans, however, the acronym NFS now means something very different: “Not For Sale.”

That was the mantra on a steamy late June afternoon as I marched with thousands of protesters along Santa Fe streets on our way to the Eldorado Hotel. There, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and three other cabinet secretaries were to speak at the annual conference of the Western Governors’ Association.

While marching, I was flanked by an array of lively signs. “Nature is Sacred and Not For Sale.” A hummingbird photo was bordered by the words “Nature Heals.”

Once nature is fragmented beyond repair, however, it can no longer heal us. Habitat loss remains the primary driver of biodiversity loss. As I write in my new book, The Light Between Apple Trees, when species diversity and gene flows are impoverished, ecosystems can no longer remain resilient or support the “assembly of life” that depends on them. Aggressive fragmentation will follow the Trump administration’s and Utah Senator Mike Lee’s frenzied and persistent, if temporarily stalled, attempts to sell millions of acres of public land.

Standing before the steps of the Eldorado Hotel, the crowd chanted “Not For Sale.” Sage smoke wafted across my face. I stood behind tribal members of mixed Navajo and Chicana ancestry, including a woman holding a gorgeous infant. A dozen steps above us, armed state police formed a line to block the entrance to the hotel. They were roundly booed by the protesters.

If Secretary Burgum wasn’t going to make an appearance, the crowd wanted their governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, to speak to their concerns. “We want the governor!” they shouted. But a protest organizer intervened and requested a Navajo man to offer a prayer.

An Indigenous grandmother mounted the steps and introduced a young Navajo man who had been drumming behind me. He went up and offered a lyrical prayer, asking that Mother Earth be protected and wild animals feel safe. The prayer had a unifying effect on the crowd. The Navajo infant had grown irritated by the hot sun, but she soon fell asleep to chants of “Not For Sale — Ever! Never!”

Photo: Priyanka Kumar

Signs bounced up and down as we marched around the hotel to a tinted glass wall behind which the Interior Secretary, cabinet ministers, and governors were believed to be standing. The signs read: “We Are All In This Together” and “Then They Came for Our Trees.” Children I’ve known since they were babies wielded signs such as “Keep Your Hands Off Our Camping Lands” and “I Love Nature.” And, “NFS: Not For Sale.” Conservationist William deBuys waved a blue-green Earth flag. Our rhythmic clapping mingled with chanting “Not For Sale.”

As I marched on, a sign proclaiming “America’s Best Idea Is Worth Fighting For” refreshed me. The public lands in danger of being lost forever are the responsibility of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Portions of the Carson National Forest where I researched sensitive bird species such as the Northern goshawk are at risk, as are pieces of BLM land such as a historic orchard that inspired my new book.

Over a decade back, the BLM purchased one of the oldest orchards in the area where I live. The property has been likened to New Mexico’s Walden and is a haven of biodiversity — with 120-year-old apple trees, a constellation of birds, and an acequia that has been flowing since 1718. Ancient orchards are repositories of cultural and ecological history and should not be up for sale to the highest commercial bidders. Among the apple varieties that grow in this orchard is the Wolf River apple, a large baking apple that was initially established in 1856 along Wisconsin’s Wolf River by a woodsman from Québec.

Black locust and mulberry trees at the Real Orchard. Photo: Priyanka Kumar

While the apple is a beloved American fruit, many people don’t know about our country’s storied apple history because they lack access to historic orchards and wild areas where feral apples still grow. Auctioning off public lands near Western cities, as Lee and others proposed, will only worsen the disconnect between us and nature.

The day after the rally brought a temporary reprieve. The provision to sell off public lands had been introduced in the Senate without being voted on in the House, and Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determined that its language violated the rules of the reconciliation process. The Byrd rule prevents the insertion of “extraneous provisions” that don’t directly impact spending and revenue.

In response to public backlash, Lee signaled that national forest land would be excluded from the sale but brought back the provision in a revised form. Amid fresh backlash, this time from conservative hunting and fishing groups as well, Lee’s revised proposal ran into another setback.  Unable to guarantee that the land wouldn’t get sold off to investment companies and foreign interests, the provision was pulled at the last minute from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

While the rally and across-the-aisle backlash have earned public lands a brief reprieve, the impetus to sell them remains strong, and the future of the BLM orchard I love is far from secure. Federal agencies that manage public lands have suffered deep budget cuts. As I have discovered on research trips to public lands, it takes dedicated rangers to keep a historic orchard watered.

This spring and summer, as I researched grassland birds in national wildlife refuges, I found visitor centers shut, vault restrooms locked, and supervisors and managers “retired.” All of these felt like signs to discourage people from visiting public lands, which would further erode our connection to nature and perhaps weaken our outcry the next time public lands are threatened. At a time when our forests and grasslands remain vulnerable to a future selloff, Americans could seize the reprieve we have earned to make big, beautiful signs about the ways in which nature sustains our bodies and spirits. Such essential sustenance should never be up for sale.

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Previously in The Revelator:

What’s Being Done to Public Lands Is a Crime

Going Beyond Grass: Turning Lawns Into a Pollinators’ Paradise

It’s time to rethink the American lawn: a landscaping default that sucks up money, water, chemicals, and time.

If you ask someone to name their favorite smells, fresh-cut grass often makes the list. For many of us, it evokes an almost collective memory of an endless childhood summer.

And maybe that’s where grass belongs — in our memories.

Because while most people regard habitat as something wild and distant, our yards were once habitat — before they became a uniform expanse of lawn.

Today about 80% of Americans grow lawns, covering 40 million acres, or 2% of the country. Few of us think of ourselves as grass farmers, yet in the aggregate, grass is the single largest irrigated crop that Americans grow.

It doesn’t have to be. What was once habitat can become habitat again. Habitat that helps sustain pollinators (and therefore a host of other species) can be created — or restored — just beyond the front porch.

Our Debt to Pollinators

While lawns — typically Kentucky bluegrass and other commercially popular grass species — feel good under our feet, they offer little to our pollinator pals in the way of flowers or nesting sites.

Lawn grass doesn’t depend on pollinators — their pollen is spread by the wind — but humans certainly do. We can thank them for 1 in 3 bites of our food and $30 billion in U.S. crops.

bee pollinating flower
Honey bees pollinate cherry blossoms at Orchard View Farms in The Dalles, Oregon. (Photo by Oregon Dept. of Agriculture, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“Pollinators give us all the fun foods. Without them, we’d be eating a lot of wheat and corn,” explains Laura Rost, the national coordinator for the Bee City USA and Bee Campus USA initiatives of The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (named in honor of an extinct California butterfly, the Xerces blue).

Around 85% of flowering plants require a pollinator, and many plants require the services of specific insects or other animals for propagation. Yet humans tend to simplify this process in our minds: Our gratitude often goes solely to honeybees, a singular species brought over by European settlers in the 17th century.

“Honeybees are not doing all the work,” Rost says. “They’re the most visible in industrial agriculture, but many native bees are in the mix and are excellent pollinators.”

The United States lays claim to 3,600 known species of native bees, many of which need protection. For example, 28% of bumble bee species have been identified as vulnerable or declining. The rusty-patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis), once common in the eastern and upper Midwestern United States, joined the endangered species list in 2017. Franklin’s bumble bee (Bombus franklini), a West Coast species last seen in 2006, may be extinct.

Other native pollinators are also at risk of extinction. Among 544 butterfly species in the United States, a March 2025 report  found a 22% decline from 2000 to 2020. In other words, for every five butterflies you’d see twenty years ago, now there are only four.

Yet even as these insects decline, we’re still discovering their benefits. For example, research published in 2022 reveals that moths visit a wider variety of plants than even bees. Yet because they work at night, these heroes have largely remained unsung.

And other non-humans need pollinators too, since the fruits and seeds produced by pollination feed birds and mammals. In the last 50 years, the number of terrestrial birds who rely on insects as a food source has dropped by 2.9 billion; meanwhile, the population of birds who don’t eat insects has actually grown.

The ‘No Mow’ Movement (and Beyond)

Habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change, and disease have all played a part in the decline of pollinators, and lawns have contributed to all of these threats. Could we cede back some of our clipped green acres to our smallest winged companions?

In 2019 the United Kingdom conservation organization Plantlife began “No Mow May,” which encourages people with lawns to resist cutting them during the month when many bees and other pollinators emerge and need food most. The movement quickly gained traction in North America, along with “Low Mow Spring” and “No Mow April” for warmer climes.

 

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“The time they’re coming out depends on the species and where you live. In the south it may be February or January,” Rost says.

For a month, at least, shaggy lawns can help pollinators thrive. Research shows a significant increase in both the abundance and species variety of bees and butterflies in lawns that are mowed less frequently.

“No mow” rules aren’t hard and fast. Some participants choose not to mow their lawns at all for the month; others scale back to every two or three weeks. And the simple act — or non-act — reminds us of something: we share our lawns with many smaller creatures.

Of course, some overgrown lawns are more nutritious than others — some are basically monocultures that contain little besides grass.

“Not mowing for a month isn’t going to save the bees,” Rost admits. “It’s a fun, small, introductory step. Most lawns don’t have flowers in their lawn that will support bees. But it’s not the goal, it’s more the idea of starting to rethink your lawn and seeing your yard as an ecosystem and [recognizing] your relationship with pollinators.”

A more diverse lawn is a more diverse biota. By allowing native wildflowers to grow and bloom, early-season pollinators like bees, butterflies, and other insects have more food and habitat available. “You’re giving them what they need to be healthy and have lot of babies,” says Rost.

But beware: not every flower that blooms there will be native. Take the common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale). Like the honeybee, it was introduced by European settlers. Cheerful though those yellow blooms are after a long winter, Rost advises digging them out. They’re known to suppress other flowers and offer poor nutrition, besides.

“Dandelion is a junk food for pollinators, like giving them French fries instead of a salad,” she says. “We know that native plants and native pollinators co-evolved and co-adapted.”

Can people just sow native wildflower seeds into their lawns?

Yes, Rost says. However, “If you’re using weed-and-feed products — an herbicide mixed with a fertilizer — nothing will come up. It’ll kill any flowers that might emerge.” And even a chemical-free lawn may see limited success from simple sowing. It depends on the plant.

At her home in Portland, Oregon, she shrank part of her lawn by throwing down lacy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia). Despite its delicate name and appearance, it’s strong enough to push through the lawn and, over time, nudge it aside. “Something delicate may not be able to fight through a grass thatch,” Rost says.

The Bee City USA website has resources for converting a lawn to a meadow…or shrinking the lawn. When Bee City organizers started in 2012, they originally focused on honeybees and beekeeping, then realized that it was native bees who faced even greater threats. Bee Campus began in 2015.

“Although we’re called Bee City, we incorporate all pollinators,” Rost says. “Butterflies, moths, even flies are great pollinators, bees and wasps, sometimes ants and birds.”

As of late May, Bee City has 236 affiliates and Bee Campus has 212, although the numbers are always changing. The day Rost and I spoke, Provo, Utah had just joined the list.

Switching Over

Scaling back lawns doesn’t have to mean an all-out rejection of grass. And it can happen step by modest step.

That’s how Rost approached it. She and her husband own a small house on a third of an acre in suburban Portland. When she bought it, the yard was “mostly just one huge cedar and lawn. I’ve been here eight years, and we shrink the lawn every year.”

Along the street, she put in a hedgerow, a dense line of native shrubs that offers privacy but also provides a corridor for pollinators. That corridor blooms now throughout the growing season, she says, and lacy phacelia surrounds the cedar on three sides. Each May its nectar-rich flowers attract bumble bees and other pollinators, with the added benefit of lovely lavender-blue flowers.

Other bees visit other plants on her property. For instance, one shrub on her hedgerow called ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) attracts smaller native bees. Rost calls it, “one of my all-stars.” When it blooms in the spring, it’s covered in tiny carpenter bees and sweat bees.

One of the keys involves planting vegetation that thrives at different times of the year, not all at once. “Pollinators need consistent resources from early spring through the fall,” Rost says. “Ask: what native plants are blooming that I have, and what can I add? Where do I have a bloom gap?”

Watch the pollinators, both when they emerge and what they like. Experiment and see who shows up.

Beyond nutrition, creating pollinator habitat also provides for many other animals. “Leaving leaves, dead stems, and logs provide lots of habitat,” Rost says. Ambitious gardeners can even grow what she calls “multi-story habitat” — small plants, shrubs, and trees.

“I encourage people to take action where you can and aim for progress, not perfection,” Rost says.

Keeping the Humans Happy

In drier climates such as the Desert Southwest, lawns are already on the way out. Drought and declining shares of the Colorado River have led some to xeriscaping, a water-wise landscape which often uses native plants.

But in wetter regions, lawns still hold an important place in many Americans’ lives. And movements away from a neatly manicured — albeit sterile — swath of grass toward a more pollinator-friendly yard sometimes still encounter headwinds.

City weed ordinances or homeowners’ association rules may prohibit natural yards or longer grass. But policies are changing, from a temporary suspension of mowing requirements to entirely new ordinances (even at the state level, in Maryland’s case).

Where there are no rules or regulations to worry about, there are likely still neighbors. To keep them happy, Rost offers tips.

For starters, she maintains a tidy edge, trimming back her shrub corridor and mowing down close to the road. That neat buffer cues people that what lies beyond it is the result of design, not neglect.

Signage helps too.

She places labels on all her native plants so that people walking by can identify them. If they like one and want to plant it themselves, they’ll know what to ask for, next time they visit a greenhouse. “It’s a little bit of a show,” Rost says.

Photo courtesy Laura Rost

The signs help in other ways: “How can you indicate to others that what you’re doing is intentional and not just lazy or messy? People see a wild yard, and they don’t yet have the language to know what they’re seeing. A purple coneflower is dead, but the birds are eating the seeds. Incorporate how people are interpreting it. They can [begin to] identify what they’re seeing and understand its role.” For people who want to create more of that habitat at home, Rost points to her organization’s Pollinator Conservation Resource Center. Click anywhere on its map and find a region-specific plant list for pollinators and beneficial insects.

If you’re a “grass farmer,” ask yourself: How much lawn is enough? Then think about shrinking it. Or framing it with a larger pollinator garden. Or heading toward a more diverse, wildlife-friendly yard by adding a native shrub this year, a native tree next year.

After all, not all that nourishing pollen needs to lie at ankle-level.

“One tree can have a meadow’s worth of flowers,” Rost says. “Picking one nice tree can feed so many mouths.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Urban ‘Microrewilding’ Projects Provide a Lifeline for Nature

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Save This Species: Owston’s Civet

One of the world’s rarest civets is threatened by the world’s most expensive coffee.

Species name:

Owston’s civet (Chrotogale owstoni)

IUCN Red Listing Status:

Endangered

Description:

This enigmatic, slender-bodied small carnivore belongs to the Viverridae family, an ancient family of “cat-like” animals. Despite their feline resemblance, civets are more closely related to mongoose and weasels, as evidenced by their long bodies and their delicate movement through the shadows. Like other civet species, Owston’s civets are nocturnal, solitary and highly elusive, making them extremely difficult to study in the wild.

What we do know about Owston’s civets is that they are primarily insectivorous and ground-dwelling. Their pelage coloration and pattern help them disappear into depths of the forest floor. Their stripes and spots help them blend into leaf litter, where they forage for earthworms by night and sleep in tree hollows during the day.

Where they’re found:

Restricted to Vietnam, Laos and a small portion of China, the Owston’s civet has only one last remaining stronghold: the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam.

Why they’re at risk:

Unfortunately, their range is now surrounded by a rapidly growing threat: the civet coffee industry.

Civet coffee is produced by feeding beans to captive civets, who pass them through their digestive tracts, a process that leaves them partially digested and uniquely fermented. It’s now one of the fastest growing segments of the luxury coffee market. Across Asia, civet species are captured en masse to be housed in intensive farms where they are force-fed coffee.

The civet coffee industry is not only an animal welfare nightmare, it causes significant risks to biodiversity conservation and multispecies health.

Ironically, Owston’s civets do not eat coffee cherries, and yet they are being driven to extinction from the snares placed in their habitat to catch their relatives, the species who can produce civet coffee. Once captured, Owston’s civets are smuggled into the illegal pet and meat trades via the same farms where other civet species are exploited for coffee production.

The civet coffee industry is not only unethical and cruel, it‘s also truly unnecessary, as its only sale value is based on novelty and the false marketing claims of exclusivity and high social status.

Who’s trying to save them:

Unfortunately, civets have gone largely ignored in scientific and animal advocacy circles, despite the numerous threats that these species face. This is why I founded The Civet Project Foundation: to tackle the civet coffee industry and to highlight the wonders of these amazing civet species.

As the leading voice for civet species, the foundation’s mission is to protect them from exploitation through collaborative, inclusive and scientifically driven research and public outreach.

Established as a nonprofit just two years ago, we’ve already made significant achievements in this arena. Every April 4 (the anniversary of the Owston’s civet conservation action plan agreement) we hold World Civet Day, a day of global civet celebration. This year World Civet Day reached an estimated 400,000 people. Our work highlighting the civet coffee industry has brought the issue into schools, colleges, universities, and zoos globally. And we’ve had over 200 animal advocacy organizations join forces with us to campaign for the end of civet coffee tourism by engaging with policy makers and industry leaders for policy change. We were the first organization to get agreement from Booking.com, TUI, AirBnB, Klook, Viator, and Tripadvisor to stop the marketing and sale of civet coffee tourism, and we are now working around the clock to keep these organizations accountable to their promises.

Most exciting, however, is the development of The Civet Project’s upcoming flagship project –  The Civet One Health initiative, the world’s first One Health program targeting the commercial farming of civets for civet coffee and civet meat. Designed as a multiyear and interdisciplinary program, the program will work with stakeholders (local communities, farmers, restaurant owners, civet coffee tour operators, and the public) to end commercial civet farming in Vietnam to protect civets, humans, and the environment.

My favorite experience:

My own favorite experience in this journey has been visiting Vietnam while producing our award-winning documentary, From Rare to Reckless, where we traced the truth behind the world’s most expensive coffee and documented its consequences for animal welfare, conservation and human health.

While what we found in the civet farms was truly harrowing, the highlight of the trip was seeing Owston’s civets who had been rescued from exploitation and meeting the people who are working tirelessly to rid the species’ natural habitat from indiscriminate snaring.

This is why I advocate so heavily for Owston’s civet: there is hope. There‘s a future for this species which can be achieved through collaboration, raising awareness and collective action. Together, we can stop the civet coffee industry. Together, we can save civet species.

You can help Owston’s civets by:

    • Watching and sharing our documentary to help us spread awareness of the civet coffee industry;
    • Signing our petition to hold Tripadvisor accountable to their own animal welfare policy by stopping the sale of civet coffee tours on their platform.

Share your stories: Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Save This Species. 

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Previously in The Revelator:

Save This Species: Sunda Pangolin

NEPA: The Accepted Lies and Mistakes About This Critical Environmental Law

The National Environmental Policy Act makes government decisions better and more democratic, despite what critics claim.

Suppose a friend calls you up and says he wants you to invest a million dollars in a new company that he heard is going to make tons of money. Before you decide whether to do so, wouldn’t you expect to know what the risks of losing your money might be? Wouldn’t you investigate the people who are going to run the new company and the kind of activities they intend to engage in, so you have a sense of whether it’s a safe thing to do with your money?

That’s the common-sense idea behind the National Environmental Policy Act, whose adoption by Congress kicked off the “environmental decade” of the 1970s.

NEPA requires government agencies to use a transparent process with meaningful public participation to consider the potential environmental effects of their actions before committing to them. It is one of the United States’ bedrock environmental protection statutes and has been so widely emulated in other countries that it has become known as the “Magna Carta” of global environmental law.

In the U.S., however, NEPA has recently been the subject of withering scrutiny and attack by critics across the political spectrum. Its opponents have called for the narrowing of NEPA’s scope and the “streamlining” of its processes, charging that the Act’s core mandate to “look before you leap” has spun out of control and created unintended and massive obstacles to approval of critical infrastructure.

These criticisms have prompted corrosive actions by all three branches of the federal government that have weakened NEPA and impaired its ability to serve its valuable, intended functions.

Congressional actions: Proposals to adopt “permitting reform,” often simply a euphemism for weakening NEPA, have been the subject of congressional debate and legislation for over a decade. Congress adopted a series of subject matter-specific exemptions and provisions to accelerate NEPA review in 1996, 2005, 2014, and 2018.

In the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, it also enacted extensive amendments that authorized the enhanced use of “categorical exclusions” from the NEPA process and required agencies to move through that process much more quickly when NEPA does apply.

Notwithstanding all of these laws, the reconciliation bill currently being crafted in Congress proposes further curtailments to environmental reviews. These provisions include the creation of unprecedented shortcuts for developers, including exemption from judicial review — as long as they agree to pay for and carry out the NEPA analysis process. Because the federal courts have been the primary forum for enforcing NEPA since its inception, this mechanism risks turning NEPA into a “paper tiger” that looks good on the page but has no real teeth.

Executive actions: In 2020 the first Trump administration adopted the first significant revisions to the regulations of the Council on Environmental Quality that govern agency compliance with NEPA since their initial adoption in 1978. These revisions sharply scaled back opportunities for public input, completely contrary to Congress’ intent when it enacted NEPA in 1969. The Biden administration essentially restored the pre-2020 status quo while retaining some of the streamlining the critics desired.

President Trump Announces Proposed Changes to NEPA Regulations

But the second Trump administration seeks a more permanent, more radical, and more dangerous solution. CEQ is trying to repeal in their entirety the regulations that have governed NEPA for over 45 years. Such a repeal would leave individual agencies free to adopt their own, disparate versions of NEPA review, with attendant inconsistencies and uncertainties. In addition, there is little chance that CEQ will call out agencies that take advantage of this new-found discretion to avoid meaningful NEPA compliance.

The Trump administration has also introduced what it calls “alternative NEPA procedures” that ludicrously reduce project timelines, even for major projects, from what would normally require a couple of years to evaluate carefully to as little as two weeks. Such an abbreviated process amounts to not bothering to check out the financial risks before sinking a million dollars into your friend’s investment scheme.

The federal courts: Some of the most alarming erosions of NEPA’s authority are happening in the judiciary. In 2024 a panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that CEQ has no authority to issue regulations that bind other federal agencies — even though no party in the case even raised the issue. Although the full D.C. Circuit disavowed that holding, a federal district court in North Dakota subsequently reached the same conclusion.

On May 29 the Supreme Court issued a decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, sharply cutting the scope of environmental effects, especially indirect effects, that agencies must consider under NEPA. In doing so the Court chastised lower courts for their supposedly excessive interpretations of what NEPA requires of agencies (despite longstanding legal support for such interpretations). It even provided a green light for a court to allow projects to go forward even if that court determines NEPA has been violated. Subsequently, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a concurring opinion that blasted NEPA as well as judicial efforts to enforce it, making even Justice Kavanaugh’s critiques in Seven County look mild.

There are two common threads to this surge of NEPA-demonizing actions: the complete absence of evidence that NEPA is the principal culprit for delays in development; and ignorance of and impairment to the core democratizing function of NEPA.

First, the repeated justification for this latest outbreak of NEPA reforms is the argument that the Act has stymied beneficial development, in part because public interest litigants have abused it by bringing frivolous lawsuits whose sole purpose is delay. But astonishingly, critics in all three government branches have provided no empirical support whatsoever for their claims that NEPA is responsible for the delays they decry. In fact, there is more evidence for the countervailing view, that other factors — in particular poor project financing and lack of resources — have constituted the main barriers to project completion.

Second, those who call for “streamlining” regard increasing the efficiency of the NEPA process as the most important, if not the only, goal. But NEPA’s primary goal has never been efficient analysis. Rather, NEPA was established to make government decisions better, through accumulation and consideration of information concerning a project’s environmental risks, followed by tailoring of the project to mitigate those risks, and more democratic, by inviting affected stakeholders to weigh in from a project’s inception about how it might affect the environment and the manner in which they rely on it.

The efforts in each branch of the federal government to rush NEPA review consistently disregard the reasons that Congress adopted NEPA in the first place. Congress directed NEPA in large part at government agencies that were regularly ignoring disastrous potential environmental consequences and shutting out affected people from their decision-making process. These harmful and anti-democratic decisions were particularly committed by agencies with development-oriented missions that viewed environmental concerns as frustrating and unwanted obstacles to desired projects. By completely ignoring this history and the problems NEPA was established to address, its critics seem to be going out of their way to make it easy for agencies and private project sponsors to sweep environmental and health risks under the rug and make it hard for the public to discover that they have done so.

While NEPA’s critics routinely and incorrectly blame the statute for stalling development, they rarely acknowledge the incalculable public benefits that have flowed from NEPA. These include:

    • The discovery of adverse effects that would have remained hidden from public view until it was too late to avoid them.
    • The education of agencies and affected stakeholders that increased awareness of environmental risks and provided opportunities for timely project alterations to minimize them.
    • The democracy-enhancing opportunities for public participation.
    • And the environmental damage avoided by judicial injunctions halting ill-advised projects approved despite defective NEPA compliance.

That is why actual studies throughout the years have repeatedly found that NEPA has saved money, time, and improved big projects while protecting the environment.

The drive to improve NEPA, particularly for projects that may be environmentally beneficial in the long term like the buildout of clean energy infrastructure, certainly has merit. Indeed, for decades Congress and presidents periodically engaged in sensible efforts to improve NEPA. Nearly all these earlier initiatives, however, focused on promoting not only more efficient processing but also more effective environ­mental review. Unfortunately, virtually all recent efforts, including legislation passed during the Biden administration, have bought into a myopic focus on hastening review without even considering whether it will lead to worse decisions or erode democracy.

Ensuring environmentally sound and democratic decisions can of course be consistent with efficient permitting and NEPA review. For instance, any new streamlined track should include standards guaranteeing that a project eligible for streamlined review is environmentally beneficial and should ensure that binding mitigation requirements are incorporated into the review process. There may be other kinds of projects designed to promote important social goals, such as affordable housing, that are also deserving of expedited review. Deciding which projects to subject to a streamlined review process requires careful consideration of how best to balance competing social goals. We have not seen anything close to that kind of debate among policymakers for a long time.

No public policy mechanism can be expected to work flawlessly. NEPA is no exception. Experience in implementing the statute since 1970 surely provides valuable lessons that can provide the foundation for improvement in its review and disclosure processes. It is critically important, though, that neither policymakers nor the public lend their support to quick fixes lacking in evidence and strident denunciations that wind up trashing a law that has served the nation so well.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action

America’s summer celebrations are upon us, and these eight books will inspire environmentalists to act for our country and our planet.

“A patriot…wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where their country can be loved and sustained. The patriot has universal values, standards by which they judge their nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.”

— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

It’s the summer season: Barbeques are firing up, the stars and stripes are in view, and people are preparing to make a difference in the second half of the year.

As we look to the “patriotic threesome” of holidays celebrated across the United States — Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day — it’s a good time to ask how you’ll show your patriotism for the planet. It’s especially important this year, given the current wave of misappropriation and compromises facing our natural lands and resources.

Eight new environmental books might offer you some ideas on how to accomplish that. They offer ideas for getting involved in politics, improving your activism, and making important changes in your homes and communities.

We’ve excerpted the books’ official descriptions below and provided links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find these books in a variety of formats through your local bookstore or library.

Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook

edited by Nick Mucha, Jessica Flint, and Patrick Thomas

The need for activism is more urgent than ever before and the risks are greater, too. Safe and effective activism has always required smart strategic planning, clear goals and creative tactics, and careful and detailed preparation. Without these, activists can end up injured, penalized, or jailed. If anything, these risks are greater today as powerful forces in government and industry resist the big changes needed to slow the climate crisis and keep Earth livable for generations to come.

Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook reflects the wisdom and best advice from activists working in today’s volatile world. A go-to resource for driving change, it offers timely and relevant insights for purpose-aligned work. It is intended as a primer for those new to activism and a refresher for seasoned activists wanting to learn from their peers, a reassuring and inspirational companion to the environmental and justice movements that we desperately need as a society.

When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership

by Amanda Litman

Most leadership books treat millennials and Gen Z like nuisances, focusing on older leadership constructs. Not this one. When We’re in Charge is a no-bullshit guide for the next generation of leaders on how to show up differently, break the cycle of the existing workplace. This book is a vital resource for new leaders trying to figure out how to get stuff done without drama. Offering solutions for today’s challenges, Litman offers arguments for the four-day workweek, why transparency is a powerful tool, and why it matters for you to both provide and take family leave. A necessary read for all who occupy or aspire to leadership roles, this book is a vision for a future where leaders at work are compassionate, genuine, and effective.

Scientists on Survival: Personal Stories of Climate Action

by Scientists for XR

In this important and timely book, scientists from a broad range of disciplines detail their personal responses to climate change and the ecological crises that led them to form Scientists for XR [Extinction Rebellion] and work tirelessly within it. Whether their inspiration comes from education or activism, family ties or the work environment, the scientists writing here record what drives them, what non-violent direct action looks like to them, what led them to become interested in the environmental crisis that threatens us all, and what they see as the future of life on Earth.

Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

by Julie Brugger

Public Land and Democracy in America brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes.

Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism.

The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920

by Joshua Nygren

In the twentieth century, natural resource conservation emerged as a vital force in U.S. politics, laying the groundwork for present-day sustainability. Merging environmental, agricultural, and political history, Nygren examines the political economy and ecology of agricultural conservation through the lens of the “conservation-industrial complex.” This evolving public-private network — which united the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress, local and national organizations, and the agricultural industry — guided soil and water conservation in rural America for much of the century. Contrary to the classic tales of U.S. environmental politics and the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, this book emphasizes continuity. Nygren demonstrates how the conservation policies, programs, and partnerships of the 1930s and 1940s persisted through the age of environmentalism, and how their defining traits anticipated those typically associated with late twentieth-century political culture.

Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future

by Slavoj Žižek

We hear all the time that we’re moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened — to accept that we’re already five minutes past zero hour?

Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Žižek’s diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past.

How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change

by Jens Beckert

For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are we so reluctant to act?

Beckert provides an answer to these questions. Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise, and social and political conflicts will intensify. We are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today’s pleasure. Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world.

Parenting in a Climate Crisis: A Handbook for Turning Fear into Action

by Bridget Shirvell

In this urgent parenting guide, learn how to navigate the uncertainty of the climate crisis and keep your kids informed, accountable, and hopeful — with simple actions you can take as a family to help the earth.

Kids today are experiencing the climate crisis firsthand. Camp canceled because of wildfire smoke. Favorite beaches closed due to erosion. Recess held indoors due to extreme heat. How do parents help their children make sense of it all? And how can we keep our kids (and ourselves) from despair?

Environmental journalist and parent Bridget Shirvell has created a handbook for parents to help them navigate these questions and more, weaving together expert advice from climate scientists, environmental activists, child psychologists, and parents across the country. She helps parents answer tough questions (how did we get here?) and raise kids who feel connected to and responsible for the natural world, feel motivated to make ecologically sound choices, and feel empowered to meet the challenges of the climate crisis—and to ultimately fight for change.

Enjoy these summer reads throughout the holidays and get involved with activities and protests that support our environment and wildlife. Whether it’s changing the way you celebrate to more sustainable fun or joining environmental summer pursuits, we hope you’ll make good trouble this holiday season.

For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several on staying calm in challenging times — visit the Revelator Reads archives.

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The Politicians Who Cried Wolf

Wolf conservation in the European Union has become a political issue instead of a scientific and environmental one, leading to ineffective policymaking.

“The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in 2023, after her family pony — Dolly — was killed by a wolf in Saxony. “I urge local and national authorities to take action where necessary.”

And act they did. By the end of the year, von der Leyen’s Commission, the primary executive arm of the European Union, submitted a proposal to change the conservation status of the wolf from “strictly protected” to simply “protected.” This change, which was approved in early 2025, not only offers EU member states greater autonomy and flexibility in how they choose to manage their respective wolf populations, but also lowers restrictions on hunting — a practice which had been largely prohibited since 1979, when comprehensive rehabilitation endeavors first began.

While wolf populations in Europe have recovered significantly since the 1970s — their numbers are thought to have increased 60% over the past decade alone — researchers warn that policymaking on both the national and European level is increasingly motivated by personal and political interests as opposed to scientific data, leading to ineffective governance and potentially unnecessary environmental destruction.

“Wolves are doing well over most of Europe, despite poaching, culling, and so many other attempts to control them,” Luigi Boitani, professor emeritus at the University of Rome and one of the world’s foremost experts on wolf conservation, tells The Revelator via email.

At the same time, he contends, systematic killings in countries like Sweden and France are “keeping population growth well under the potentiality of the species and not at all reducing the level of depredation on livestock.”

Rather, he says, such measures “are good only to satisfy the prejudices of incompetent policy makers.”

From Decline to Growth

Up until the late 18th century, wolves lived across Europe — from the British Isles to the Baltics and Balkans. Deforestation, agriculture, and commercial and recreational hunting — accelerated by the Industrial Revolution — caused populations to shrink and disperse. Eurasian wolves (Canis lupus lupus, a subspecies related to North America’s gray wolf, Canis lupus) disappeared from countries where they had once been a relatively common sight, not to mention important cultural symbols.

Wolf populations did not recover until the late 1970s, when the Bern Convention — also known as the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats — turned wildlife conservation into a legal obligation for all members of the Council of Europe, and later the EU. Hunting limitations on prey species like boar and deer, as well as investment in nonlethal livestock protection, paved the way for the wolf’s return to the point that the species can once again be found in every mainland EU country.

While some endangered species have proven difficult to monitor, the Eurasian wolf is not one of them.

“There may be some misconceptions about wolves, such as their impact on livestock or game, or their risk to humans,” says John Linnell, a professor at the University of Inland Norway’s Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management, “but data on density and numbers is actually very good — especially when compared to 99% of other species.”

Tried and tested monitoring methods — including analysis of animal remains, camera trapping, and snow tracking — paint a reliable picture of wolf population size and distribution. A 2024 report on large carnivores by the European Commission estimated that its member states were home to a total of around 23,000 wolves, with some of the biggest populations residing in Romania, Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland, Germany, and France. That’s more than in the U.S., whose wolf population is estimated at around 16,500.

Although that report found some debate about the extent to which these impressive statistics can be attributed to the increasing scope and sophistication of wolf-related research, many experts agree that the data is sound enough to inform policymaking.

The problem is: it doesn’t.

Blinded by Preconceptions

“We are talking about a whole continent here,” Linnell stresses, “not a small study area. And while we can’t hold our hands over our hearts and swear that each number is correct, we do have a very good idea as to what is going on. How scientific data is used or abused in politics — if used at all — that’s a totally different story.”

Take the European Commission’s campaign to alter the wolf’s conservation status. The impetus for this campaign stemmed from a personal incident — the death of Dolly, the 30-year-old pet pony — not scientific data, which should have been the standard.

In fact, the decision ignored scientific data.

In 2024 University of León Department of Biodiversity professor Andrés Ordiz and co-authors discussed the then-ongoing debate over wolf management in a paper titled “Large carnivore management at odds: Science or prejudice?” They noted that the Commission assumed wolves had come to pose a serious threat to people — despite the fact that, as they wrote, “the risk of a wolf attack is so low that it cannot even be calculated.”

Time and again the Commission relied on arguments that ignored or contradicted scientific evidence. In a press release, it warned that the risk of attacks was particularly high for those living near a “concentration of wolf packs” — a “vague idea” unknown to research, according to the Ordiz paper, which said the phrase “likely refers to core areas of wolf populations where densities are higher,” although that would make the statement incorrect, as “conflicts are more likely to occur at the edges” of such areas, where wolves are seldom seen.

Instead of consulting researchers, the Commission launched an online survey that collected data from non-scientific organizations. It also conducted public-opinion polls in 24 EU member states. Surprisingly, large majorities from both urban and rural areas (71% and 68% respectively) come out in favor of maintaining rather than decreasing protection — data which also seem to have been ignored by the Commission.

Considering that past attempts to elevate the wolf’s conservation status have been rejected due to a lack of published scientific evidence, the Ordiz paper reached the sobering conclusion that the standards for decreasing environmental protections in the EU today appear to be much lower than those for increasing them.

The Future of European Wolves

Two questions remain: How will the decision to change the wolf’s conservation status impact European populations? And if this decision was not based on scientific research, what would a policy that’s actually based on science look like?

Regarding the first question, some researchers suspect that the change will have little-to-no effect.

“It is very difficult to reduce wolf populations, especially if regulations vary in each country,” says L. David Mech, an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology and founder of the International Wolf Center. “Wolves easily disperse across borders, so reductions in one area can easily be compensated by dispersal and reproduction from neighboring countries.”

Boitani, meanwhile, fears the EU could undo some of the progress it has made during the previous decades, concluding that “wolf numbers might decrease at continental scale” with “huge differences” at the local level, depending on the actions of individual countries.

Finally, Linnell’s outlook is slightly more positive. “There is no automatic reason that wolf populations will decline,” he says, noting that populations in countries where the wolf was already subject to less stringent conservation requirements — like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Greece — did not fare worse than those of other countries.

“Everything depends on how member states utilize their new flexibility and the increased responsibility that goes with it,” he explains. “A more liberal use of lethal control also requires more extensive monitoring of populations and continued investment in livestock protection measures.”

Linnell says he hopes the downlisting will lower some of the social and political conflicts among rural stakeholders. “However, if countries do not take this new responsibility seriously it could lead to an escalation in conflicts with environmentalists. The devil will be in the details of implementation.”

Ironically, the second question — what policy informed by science as opposed to sentiment would look like — does not produce a consensus either.

“A well-established reason to conserve large carnivores is the role they play in nature,” Ordiz tells The Revelator via email. “They are keystone species — species that can play a larger ecological function than their low numbers may let us think. They are apex predators, placed at the uppermost corner of trophic cascades, and thus by nature they are largely free of predation. If management was aimed at favoring that ecological role, human intervention of large carnivore populations should be kept at a minimum. Carnivores would not need to ‘look over their shoulder’ and run away from human persecution.”

In keeping with his previous answer, Linnell does not take issue with the change in conservation status per se, which need not negatively impact wolf populations, but the flawed decision-making process behind it.

“The problem with the recent downlisting of wolves,” he says, “is that there were no clear criteria set for if wolves could or should be downlisted. Studies that had previously been used to justify not downlisting wolves were suddenly used to support downlisting, and there were no real structured processes to identify how science, and which science, should have been used to guide the process.”

Linnell adds, “I hope that the EU learns from this process so that future proposals for changes … can be conducted in a much more structured manner.”

Previously in The Revelator:

19 Books About Wolves

An Early ‘Independents’ Day?

What if a few moderate Republicans stood up and left their party? A bold move could weaken Trump and help democracy and the planet.

A few weeks ago, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska made a rather startling admission: The new Trump administration had left her feeling “anxious” and “afraid” of retaliation.

“I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right,” she said at a leadership summit, as reported by the Anchorage Daily News.

The senator isn’t alone on that front. Almost everyone I talk to expresses some level of fear about the current administration and the president’s supporters.

But Sen. Murkowski is in a unique position to do something specific about it.

She could drop out.

No, I’m not asking Sen. Murkowski to leave the legislature. I’m suggesting that she do something even more dramatic: Announce that she’s leaving the Republican Party, proclaim that the current party leadership has lost its way and fallen behind a power-mad president who’s ill-suited for office, and make clear that she can no longer be a participant in this immoral administration.

Sen. Murkowski herself suggested this possibility last year, so maybe the time has finally come.

Murkowski wouldn’t need to go as far as joining the Democratic Party. She could become an Independent, which would at the very least put her out of the Republican voting bloc and further weaken their current slim majority.

At the very least, this could make it a little bit harder for the Trump / MAGA / Musk / Project 2025 teams to implement their regressive agendas. Right now, everything anyone can do to slow them down will make a difference.

And Murkowski might find that others share her desire for change. Many Republicans are obviously afraid of Trump and his supporters or weary of his chaos. They might be afraid to stand up to him one on one, but there’s strength in numbers. A group defecting would be safer — and more powerful — than an individual.

And that’s the real potential of switching teams. The Republicans currently have a slim majority in both the House and Senate. If five, 10, or 20 elected officials stood up for the Constitution, due process, morality, and the environment and left the Republican Party, we could eliminate that majority or even flip the balance of power — long before the 2026 midterms.

Who else could possibly make this ethical defection? Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has a fairly bipartisan voting record (and obviously no love for Donald Trump). Mike Lawler of New York has taken a handful of moderate positions (and recently incurred the wrath of his constituents at a dramatic town hall). California’s David Valadao voted to impeach Trump in 2021 (and still managed to win reelection in 2024). West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito voted with Biden more often than not (albeit ever so slightly). New Jersey’s Tom Kean, Jr., hails from a district that voted for Biden in 2020 (and only narrowly went to Trump in 2024) and sits on the Climate Solutions Caucus, whose members also include co-chair Andrew Garbarino (NY) and Don Bacon (Nebraska). (Bacon recently said he didn’t want to follow Trump “off the cliff.”) Pennsylvanian Brian Fitzpatrick has a relatively decent environmental voting record for a Republican, according to the League of Conservation Voters.

That’s eight. Probably not enough to flip the balance of power all at once, but it’s a start. And as they say, “courage is contagious.” Maybe others who currently keep secret about their fear and loathing of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement could find some collective backbone and help to bolster their ranks.

And if enough of them stand up? Well, there’s even the potential to impeach President Trump and get him out of office before he blows up too much more. That would be a triumphant moment for American democracy.

Honestly, I don’t hold too much hope for it. Most of the current crop of Republican legislators remains too cowed, conservative, or craven to take such a bold step — even if the future of the country or the planet is on the line.

But who knows, maybe a few of them — like those reeling from angry town halls — are just looking for an easy “out.”

So what do you say, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Lawler, and other Republicans? Care to take a stand?

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Previously in The Revelator:

Election Day Sucked. Today Is What Matters.

Something for Everyone: Wildlife Trade in Paradise

Our ongoing study in Bali reveals a surprising level of trade in protected species — and offers a strategy for ending it.

Many people see the Indonesian island of Bali as a tropical paradise, with something for everyone. Tourists flock there by the millions — about 16 million in 2024 alone. Some visit for the island’s amazing beaches, plenty of sunshine, excellent surfing, good food and drinks. Others come for the arts, meditation, ancient Balinese cultures, or the amazing landscapes, mountains, nature and endemic wildlife.

We understand the draw of Bali: It’s a beautiful island treasured both by those who live there and visit.

But few people realize that Bali is also a center for Indonesia’s domestic and international wildlife trade.

And it’s not hidden.

Previous researchers and conservation NGOs have raised alarms about Bali’s substantial role in the trade of marine species. In the 1990s fishermen landed some 20,000 green turtles in Bali annually and these were traded domestically. In the 2000s exporters took a central role in the export of Banggai cardinal fish, with tens of thousands of fish exported each month. And the seas north of Bali remain heavily exploited for corals for the international aquarium trade.

Some of this trade was well-known within Bali and led to awareness campaigns by local and international NGOs and, while it was never hidden, it was easy for outsiders to ignore or not notice.

Over recent years, we’ve undertaken a comprehensive assessment and quantification of Bali’s wildlife trade. This initiative marks a critical first step in identifying and curbing illegal wildlife transactions that contravene local and national laws, while simultaneously enhancing the regulation and oversight of legal trade practices. Unlike previous work, we did not focus on one particular type of wildlife for sale. Instead we aimed to collect data on as wide a range of species as possible. We focused on two sets of species: animals whose trade is restricted or banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and others that are legally protected by Indonesia or for which their commercial trade is regulated.

As we progress through our assessment, we’ve uncovered a startling prevalence of wildlife trade in Bali — much of it previously unreported or underreported.

Trade in CITES-Listed Species

We found a widespread availability of CITES-listed species for sale in wildlife trade shops, art markets, and “antique” shops.

Building upon our initial observations, we conducted a comprehensive survey of Bali’s wildlife trade, revealing a concerning prevalence of endangered species products openly available in the market. We observed almost 1,000 primate skulls for sale, some 600 chambered nautilus shells, and 500 black coral bracelets, as well as 75 sperm whale teeth, 50 babirusa skulls, and 20 sun bear teeth.

Disturbingly, the majority of these items were displayed in shops catering predominantly to foreign tourists. When we approached vendors, they assured two of us — Jessica, a U.S. citizen, and Vincent, a Dutch citizen — that transporting these items home would pose no issues. However, none informed us of the necessity for CITES permits, highlighting a concerning lack of awareness or transparency regarding international wildlife trade regulations.

In fact, based on previous CITES records, the majority, if not all, of these items will be exported without any CITES permits. All primates are listed on CITES, meaning all international trade in them is regulated and requires permits from the Indonesian CITES Management Authority. Over the past 25 years, Indonesia only ever gave permits for primate skulls twice: a macaque for export to the U.S. in 2005 and a Bornean gibbon for export to Thailand in 2016.

Beyond the species we could readily identify and quantify, we also encountered numerous items crafted from CITES-listed species, where assessment proved more challenging.

For example, at least 10 species of Dalbergia rosewoods are native to Indonesia, with Indian and North Indian rosewoods being commercially exploited for timber. Since 2017, all Dalbergia species have been listed in CITES Appendix II, requiring export permits for international trade. In Bali’s most tourist-centric areas, over 100 shops sell wood carvings, many specifically targeting tourists. During our visits, knowledgeable vendors consistently presented carvings made from rosewood. None, however, mentioned the necessity of CITES permits. This oversight suggests that tourists purchasing these items may unknowingly engage in the illegal cross-border trade of CITES-listed species.

Trade in Legally Protected Species

Some of the species that we mentioned above are not only listed on CITES but are also legally protected in Indonesia. This includes some, but not all, primate species, one type of chambered nautilus, sperm whales, babirusas and sun bears.

Other protected species we observed openly offered for sale were Javan porcupine (skulls are traded as novelty aquarium objects), Javan deer (antlers are carved in myriad ways), and horned helmet (shells are sold as decorative objects or portable souvenirs), along with dozens more. Much of this trade was targeted at foreign tourists, who again were unaware that their purchases involved the illegal cross-border trade of protected wildlife.

There is also a substantial live trade in legally protected animals, mainly birds and freshwater fish. Different from the trade that targets foreign tourists, this is clearly a domestic trade. Live birds and fish are not offered in the main tourist areas but in specialized animal markets in the main cities. We observed hundreds of legally protected birds sourced from various parts of Indonesia (Sumatra, Java, Indonesian Borneo, Sulawesi, Papua) for sale at the three main animal markets in Bali (Satria, Sanglah and Beringkit).

A Note on “Antiques”

While an antique is traditionally defined as a collectible item at least 100 years old, many Balinese antique shops offer a diverse array of products, the majority of which are of more recent origin. Some items are newly crafted to mimic the appearance of age through techniques such as staining and distressing, blurring the lines between authentic antiques and contemporary reproductions.

Solutions to This Global Problem

Our focus on Bali’s wildlife trade stems from the understanding that addressing these pressing challenges extends beyond the purview of Indonesian conservation authorities alone.

Tourism is the cornerstone of Bali’s economy, much of the island’s income is derived from this sector. For many visitors, Bali’s reputation for environmental stewardship and natural beauty is a significant draw, often leading to repeat visits.

This strong connection between tourism and environmental appeal presents a unique opportunity to leverage public interest in conservation to combat the illegal wildlife trade effectively.

While the total amount of wildlife we observed offered for sale was much larger than we anticipated, the trade seems to be concentrated in a few areas in southern Bali. Out of the thousands of shops selling to tourists, we repeatedly observed CITES listed or protected wildlife for sale in just over 100 stores. Based on what is on offer at any given time, the sale of protected and/or CITES listed wildlife represents only a small proportion of most shops’ overall revenue. Ending the sale of this wildlife is unlikely to cause financial hardship for the majority of shop owners.

We feel the best way to achieve this would be a short but effective campaign to actively enforce existing legislation through the confiscation of illegal items; prosecution of sellers; and public education. This would need to include publicizing any successful prosecutions — a big change from current practice, where law enforcement agencies hold press events to announce seizures and arrests but don’t promote what happens next.

This would best be achieved through a collaboration between the Balinese tourism community (hotels, tourism boards, travel agents), businesses (through the local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce), expats living in Bali, and the governor of Bali’s office.

To effectively combat wildlife trafficking in Bali, it is imperative to strengthen inter-agency collaboration both within the island and across Indonesia. This necessitates coordinated efforts among conservation organizations, local governments, and law enforcement agencies — including forestry officials, police, customs, and prosecutors. Such collaboration should focus on sharing intelligence regarding trafficking networks and allocating resources to enhance enforcement capabilities, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of anti-trafficking initiatives. It is also paramount that the Indonesian CITES Management Authorities (based in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta on Java) liaises better with its international counterparts to address this international trade. This includes Australia, the EU, China and the United States, countries with which Indonesia already has strong trade links.

And an equally important step starts with the thousands of tourists who visit Bali each year: Don’t buy wildlife products, and don’t support the retailers who sell them. You’re coming to the island to enjoy its natural beauty: Leave wildlife in the wild where it belongs.

Part of this work was supported by the United States Department for Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service (USDA ARS NACA number 20230048, grant number 58-3022-2-020). These findings do not represent official views or endorsements of the United States Government.

Further reading:

Chavez J, Nijman V, Payuse INAD 2023. Trade in sperm whale curios in Bali. Oryx 57(6): 695-696.

Chavez J, Payuse INAD, Kuntayuni, et al. 2024. Tourism, international wildlife trade and the (in)effectiveness of CITES. Environmental Conservation 51(1): 64-70

Chavez J, Kuntayuni, Nijman V 2024. Trade of skulls as novelty and aquarium objects are an additional threat to porcupines. Journal of Threatened Taxa 16(1): 24584-24588.

Chavez J, Nijman V 2024. The open sale of primate skulls on Bali reveal complex Indonesia-wide wildlife trade networks. Primate Conservation 38: 175-184.

Chavez J, Campera M, Hensley LE, et al. 2025. Illegal wildlife trade in a tourism and biodiversity hotspot. Sustainable Development

Previously in The Revelator:

Cash for Corals: Exploiting Ecosystems on Their Way to Extinction

Trump vs. Birds: Proposed Budget Eliminates Critical Research Programs

Experts say there’s “no substitute” for the Bird Banding Laboratory or the Breeding Bird Survey, which help reveal the health and status of avian populations across the country.

Two federal programs that experts consider indispensable for bird research and conservation in the United States could be eliminated under the Trump administration’s proposed budget for 2026.

If you’re not an ornithologist, you’ve probably never heard of the Bird Banding Laboratory or the Breeding Bird Survey, two federal programs managed by the U.S. Geological Survey. But birds in this country — and around the world — would be much worse off without these two programs, which I covered at length in my 2023 book on the history of bird migration research.

The Bird Banding Laboratory has a history in the federal government that stretches back over a century. As you might guess from its name, the program oversees bird banding in the United States — the process through which bird researchers humanely capture wild birds, place uniquely numbered metal bands around their legs, and release them. Tracking banded birds allows researchers to learn something about their lives and movements and has produced mountains of scientific data.

The Breeding Bird Survey, meanwhile, began in the 1960s. It enlists thousands of eager volunteers each spring to carry out surveys of local birds across the continent, providing long-term data on whether populations are increasing or decreasing over time. We wouldn’t know how well common but vulnerable birds, from hawks to hummingbirds, are doing without these annual surveys.

But that barely scratches the surface about how central these two programs are to bird conservation efforts in North America — and what we would lose if they’re defunded.

Most wild birds in the United States are protected by a law called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it illegal to handle or capture them without a permit. And because nearly all research that involves capturing wild birds includes banding them, scientists generally obtain those permits through the Bird Banding Laboratory.
Hawai'i 'amakihi

“The BBL ensures that all people banding birds are prioritizing wildlife safety, are appropriately trained, and are conducting meaningful research that justifies capturing wild animals,” Joely DeSimone, a researcher at the University of Maryland Maryland Center for Environmental Science, tells me by email. “I’ve been working in the field of migration physiology and ecology since 2016, and every project I’ve worked on in that time has included the Bird Banding Lab because this work included the capture and release of wild birds. Every bird we capture receives an aluminum band issued by the BBL, and its data is reported to and managed by the BBL.” It’s unclear how, or if, researchers like DeSimone would continue to obtain the necessary permits for their work if the laboratory were eliminated.

Bird Banding Lab staff also oversee the treasure trove of data that results from bird banding: records of what bird species have been captured where and when that go back more than 60 years. Any curious scientist can delve into this data to look for patterns, and researchers have used it to, among many other things, quantify how the timing of bird migration has gradually shifted in recent decades as the climate has warmed.

Banding is also an incredible outreach tool for engaging the public in bird conservation.

“The vast majority of bird banding stations open their sites to visitors, engage them in discussions, let them watch the banding process, and see wild birds up close,” says DeSimone. “These public engagement experiences — which are happening in communities across North America — can not only inform and excite visitors about birds and conservation, but also … perhaps more impactfully, introduce visitors to scientists and the scientific process.”

The Breeding Bird Survey offers a different window into North America’s bird populations — one based not on capturing them, but on simply spending time outdoors counting them.

The survey “has got to be the most ambitious effort in human history to study a non-human, wild set of organisms across a continental scale,” says ornithologist Benjamin Freeman, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It gives us this amazing annual check-in of which birds are living where and how many of them are there — just astonishing information on how birds are doing in North America.”

The Breeding Bird Survey is one of our top sources of information on bird population trends — whether species are increasing, declining, or holding steady in regions across the continent. That’s crucial data for planning and prioritizing conservation efforts.

Among other things, the program’s data provide the basis for the State of the Birds, a periodic status assessment produced by a group of government organizations and conservation nonprofits.

“Scientists, practitioners, and decision-makers rely upon data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey to understand long-term changes in bird populations. There is no substitute,” says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Amanda Rodewald, who chaired the committee that assembled the 2025 State of the Birds report. “BBS data have been instrumental in alerting us to worrisome declines, pointing to conservation success stories, and providing us with a lens to understand environmental conditions that affect us as well as birds.”

Although newer community science platforms such as eBird are beginning to offer similar data on trends in bird populations over time, they can’t replace long-term, standardized surveys such as those carried out by Breeding Bird Survey volunteers.

“The strength of the BBS is that it’s very structured,” says Freeman. “Everyone’s doing the same thing every year.” If the program ends, it will mean the end of additions to this unique, high-quality dataset.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget would flatline these two programs as well as the entire USGS Ecosystems Mission Area, which currently has an annual appropriation of just $307 million. That’s a tiny fraction — less than 0.00005% — of the annual budget of the federal government.

I tried to contact USGS staff who actually work on these programs for comment. What I eventually received was an emailed statement from a Department of the Interior spokesperson which read, in its entirety, “Interior proudly supports President Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ — a historic, America First budget that delivers middle-class tax cuts, unleashes American energy, secures our borders, and invests in the infrastructure and security of our public lands.”

Perhaps, at a time when so many aspects of our civil society are under threat, it seems frivolous to worry about gathering data on birds. But I’d prefer to live in a version of America that invests a little less in “unleashing American energy” and “securing our borders” and a little more in studying and protecting our wild neighbors.

Previously in The Revelator:

What’s Being Done to Public Lands Is a Crime