In July (2025) the U.S. Congress passed (with only Republican votes) and the president signed and enacted the BIG federal budget bill—which amounts to “the most aggressive, sweeping attack on America’s environment and public lands in our nation’s history – and now it’s law.” Yet the dimensions and details of this atrocity has been barely reported or mentioned by the national news media, or for that matter the Democrat “opposition party” leadership.
 
Jim Pattiz in his “More Than Just Parks” July 11, 2025, online newsletter analysis condemned both the legislation and the inept media coverage and weak defense, saying that “every passage [in this legislation] that affects our public lands . . . would be bad on its own. Together it’s the most aggressive dismantling of public lands protection in American history.”
 
 In brief summary, according to Pattiz, the legislation:

• Mandates massive logging on public lands, with huge increases in required logging of forests – regardless of any protection status—on US Forest Service-managed national forests and Bureau of Land Management-managed lands. Required increases in logging every year by 250 million board feet on national forests and by 20 million board feet on BLM lands.  Regardless of being old-growth forest ecosystems and presently roadless wild areas, regardless of dangers of increased wildfires, regardless of designations of protected wildlife habitat or special natural areas.
• Extends timber cutting contracts from one to twenty years or more in duration.
• Rescinds 50-years-long prohibitions on timber cutting and road building in more than 150 million acres of federal lands that had been previously reserved as wild “roadless areas.”
• Silences public review and defunds environmental safeguards, with a short-term review period allowed to assess environmental impacts of proposed development and extraction. The legislation’s objective is to limit meaningful oversight and allow extractive industries to bulldoze and ignore public concerns while lawsuits die in the courts.
• Defunds endangered species defense and recovery, while funding their destruction. Driving many more species into extinction.
• Slashes federal funding for climate data collection, wildlife refuges, national parks management, communities’ and parks climate resilience projects. Thus it authorizes environmental destruction while defunding protection.
• Fast tracks leasing to industry without ability to study or review potentially harmful timber cuts or mining and gas leases.
• Eliminates to zero the century-long requirements on federal agencies to return revenues from timber cutting and resource extractions to local communities for public schools, roads, or other local needs. All timber cutting revenues now instead goes to the federal Treasury, and not even to the land management agencies. Consequently, communities where the increased logging operations occur will get no federal funding and more truck traffic, road damage, and environmental degradation.
• Mandatory oil, gas, and coal-mining leases on public lands with fast-track permitting time requirements and bargain-sale rates in many Western and Gulf coast states, with speculators enabled to lease huge swaths of land at rock-bottom prices.
• Cedes over four million acres of public lands immediately for coal-mining leasing (in some places allowing mining without even requiring leases) and cuts in half the federal royalty rates from coal mined on federal lands, thus starving federal and state budgets. Federal coal reserves are effectively privatized.
• Freezing most environmental safeguards at the weakest possible baselines and prohibiting federal agencies from specifying site-specific environmental protection restrictions, like for special wildlife habitats or buffer zones for streams and rivers.
• Rolls back royalties to “fire sale” $1.50 per acre return to federal funds and without competitive bidding requirement.
• Vastly expands oil and gas drilling in Alaska wilderness area.

 
Pattiz concludes, “how do you even begin to process the totality of this destruction?! . . . Why are they so hell-bent on turning America into a third-world country . . . to rip apart our own land, strip-mine our future, and sell off everything that makes this place worth living in, just to line the pockets of a handful of already wealthy men? . . . intent on dragging us back to a feudal society, where the wealthy do whatever they want and leave the rest of us to live in the wasteland they’ve created, fighting over the scraps they toss down to keep us quiet. This is America. We were the envy of the world. Today the world looks at us and sees a dumpster fire. A country willingly tearing itself apart. Trading its once bright future for someone else’s quarterly profits. And for what? So a handful of people who already have everything, while the rest of us lose everything that actually matters. . . . They want us quiet, tired, and resigned. Don’t give them that satisfaction.”

The Fight Is Not Over!    

"We breathe the same air, eat from the same sources, share the same turf, need the same water [as all other living creatures]. Once we humans were just another animal, living off the savannas and shores . . . we still do—and we believe otherwise at our own peril. But—a big but—we’re now so distracted by our planet’s uncorked climate blowing away our rooftops, firebombing our forests, mauling our coasts, and scorching our crops that, too often, we forget that one of the biggest phase shifts in Earth’s history, a global holocaust against life itself, is also underway.

Like two vipers coiled in a deadly double-helix, the unbridled climate and mass extinction are "one indivisible crisis—a global health emergency,” as the world’s 300 top medical journals wrote in masse to the UN in 2023. Meaning:

• A third of humanity’s food supply doomed, should pollinators succumb.
• Protein famines after 2 degrees C, when virtually all corals die along with fish and shellfish who depend on the reefs.
• Tropical plants for our medicines withered.
• Monocultured crops, their genetic stocks extinct except for a few frozen relics in seed banks, defenseless from pandemics.

As all that happens, tempers shorten and violence heightens—any police blotter can correlate heat with mayhem. Wars break out over dwindling water. Refugees flee parched lands, stoking fears of hungry invading hordes, emboldening dictators and vigilantes to stop them. Like thawing glaciers, laws melt.

As pernicious new human pathogens race around a teeming, warming planet, governments like the US and the Dutch print extra money to sustain millions of quarantined citizens, quenching panic but inflating their economies. Even medical miracles that quash viruses can’t cure grocery sticker shock, so angry, anxious people turn to autocrats who promise to revive an affordable, mythical past when no ravenous foreigners threatened to steal their jobs. The easiest way for the autocrats to fuel their reign is to drill more, so temperatures mount even faster. Fires spread, winds roar, rivers surge, coasts shrink, species fade, and panic returns.

Eventually people overthrow self-serving, inept demagogues, but it’s a changed world. Amid the madness, the Center for Biological Diversity’s ecologists and lawyers keep on, submitting new candidates for protection. . . . It’s not just about them. Every weed, snail, or slug they shelter also means saving land and waters where they dwell.

The US still isn’t a signatory to the UN’s 30x30 goal of conserving at least 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030—the biggest conservation plan ever contemplated: more than doubling global protection of terrestrial, inland water, and coastal regions, and quadrupling marine protection. But in 2021, to circumvent entrenched fossil-fueled politics blocking participation, the US simply began its own 30x30 plan, entitled America the Beautiful. . . .  [but then, after publication of this book in 2024, came the Trump 2 administration and recession of practically all of the US environmental protection and land, water, wildlife conservation regulations and programs]. . . . 

The 30 billion tons of CO2 we still emit annually has us on a trajectory for a 4.3 degrees C (temperature) increase by the end of the century, unless business as usual radically changes.

It must. It comes down to two simple things humanity can do to rein in both runaway temperatures and the loss of at least a third of all species—likely more, as each loss cascades into many others.

Stop running modern life on ancient carbon, and let forests return.
. . . The alternative is we lose control of the situation. . . .  (S)o does it really matter that more than two-thirds of all birds now are chickens we raise? Life seems to go on, right?

It’s a question that’s unanswerable until it’s too late, when we find out the hard way. “No jobs on a dead planet,” notes Center for Biological Diversity co-founder Peter Galvin, reminding us that it’s best to err on the side of caution. It’s never smart to see how many foundation bricks you can remove before the building falls on you.

Either way, the biodefenders’ work will have been worth it. If humans aren’t among the species that survive into this planet’s next hotter phase, some percentage of the flora and fauna they’ve managed to load into the ark will replenish the Earth, just as in five previous extinctions—like the birds, who, against all hope, survived Chicxulub.

Or, if we’re lucky enough to be among them, they’ll be our companions. And our food."
​
May we thrive together.   NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO WATCH THIS PRESENTATION BY AUTHOR Alan Weisman:

​“. . . [W]hile I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will [and you should] never give up. . . .

[W]e will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice, and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld. . . . 

And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square, and we will also wage it in quieter ways, in how we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor, by always using our strength to lift people up to fight for the dignity that all people deserve. The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work; hard work is good work. Hard work can be joyful work. And the fight for our country is always worth it. It is always worth it. 

To the young people [I say] it is okay to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be okay. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win. But here’s the thing, here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power, and don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before. 

You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. . . . [D]o not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.

This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. . . . 

So let their [the young people’s] courage be our inspiration. Let their determination be our charge. 

And I’ll close with this, there’s an adage and historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages, the adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service. And may that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America. . . .”

The land ethic will need to help reform the traditional economic worldview to include conservation concerns in a meaningful way.
Can the land ethic have deep and meaningful impact on the human economic enterprise? This is the 750-pound gorilla. For all the discussion of sustainability in recent decades, conservation has had a hard time gaining a full hearing within the dominant schools of neoclassical economics. Especially with rapid globalization and technological change driving economic development, conservation receives scant attention in the salons of high finance and international trade.
 
Is there room, in the long run, for true reconciliation of economic and ecological worldviews? Is there any safe way out of our current addiction to the quarterly earnings report to a sincere commitment to the seventh generation? . . . . . . . . .

Southern Conservation Partners is honored to partner with Earthseed Land Collective in Durham, North Carolina and to have served as their 501(c )(3) fiscal sponsor since 2019. Zulayka Santiago in 2023 authored and published a wonderful collection of her essays, meditations, poems, photos, and perspectives on life and nature that focuses on her experiences and observations gained while in residence on Earthseed’s 48-acres of woodlands, meadows, and gardens in north Durham. Zulayka is one of seven founding members of the collective and co-steward of its property purchased in 2016. Triangle Land Conservancy holds a permanent conservation easement over nearly 30-acres of the land, primarily consisting of the forested portion and its streams.

​In our view, Zulayka’s writing is masterful, inspirational, and lovely.  We highly recommend her book, Outside I Breathe Freely, for your reading and reflection.* Following are excerpts that may give you a taste of her sumptuous compositions. 
 <click "Read More," below right >

​I visited BLK227 on a Tuesday for an interview. BLK227 is a Baldcypress tree (Taxodium distichum for the botanists) in the Three Sisters Swamp section of the Black River, a bit west of Burgaw, North Carolina. BLK227 was so named by Dr. David Stahle, who runs the Tree Ring Laboratory in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. BLK227 holds the current world record for documented age of any Baldcypress tree, 2,629 years old this year. That’s a minimum age, by the way, because Dr. Stahle had to core BLK227 at a height of 10 feet above the swamp floor, and it is unknown how long it takes for a Baldcypress seedling to reach 10 feet in height. That minimum age is impressive - that’s 629 years Before the Common Era. BLK227’s age firmly establishes Baldcypress as the oldest wetland tree species on Planet Earth, and number five on the worldwide list of the oldest known continuously living, sexually reproducing, non-clonal tree species based on dendrochronology, the scientific study of tree rings. < click "Read More" below right >