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."
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May we thrive together.   NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO WATCH THIS PRESENTATION BY AUTHOR Alan Weisman:

We highly recommend watching this eight-minute video. Grasslands are a surprising part of the North Carolina Piedmont’s (and much of the Southeast's) ecological history. Learn how planting native grassland species in our yards and other open areas mimics historical landscapes while improving the soil and fighting our changing climate. This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines reporting initiative and was produced by PBS-NC.

Most of the information and viewpoints found on the Conservation South website focus on issues, opportunities, and resources directly concerned with environmental conservation and restoration in the southern U.S. This book review is different: the topic is a “deep time” perspective. British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Thomas Halliday has authored Otherlands: Journey in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems (Penguin Random House, 2022), a fascinating overview of how Earth’s ecosystems and biota have dramatically changed over the long 4-billion-years timeline of life and tectonic forces on our planet. Each of Halliday’s sixteen chapters describes wholesale changes in ecosystems and life forms that have repeatedly occurred throughout eras of Earth history. 

Earth is now a “human planet,” asserts Halliday, nearly totally affected by we humans. He  observes, “The world as it is today is a direct result . . . of what has gone before. Much of life in the past happens in a steady state of slow-changing existence, but there are times when everything can be upended. . . .  It is by looking at the past that palaeobiologists, ecologists and climate scientists can address the near- and long-term future of our planet, casting backwards to predict possible futures. Unlike past occasions . . . our (human) species is in an unusual position of control over the outcome (of a fundamentally altered biosphere). We know that change is occurring, we know that we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know that we can stop it, and we know how. The question is whether we will try.”           <continued . . .>

We recommend for your reading a thought-provoking new book by NC State University professor of applied ecology and entomologist Rob Dunn – “A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species” (published in late 2021). This is the seventh book authored by Dunn, whose books and eloquent authorship are being compared to that of E.O. Wilson.
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Rather than asking whether nature will survive us humans, Dunn suggests it is better to ask whether we will survive nature. Despite our efforts to control nature, life has its own rules and no amount of human tampering can rewrite those basic rules. Dunn explains fundamental laws of ecology, evolution, and biogeography and shows that life will be changed but not repressed by our human activities. Instead, Dunn shows why it is our own human future and destiny that hang in the balance. 

Some excerpts from Rob Dunn’s conclusions in “A Natural History of the Future”:

“In the near future, parts of Earth will be much more pleasant for extremophilic life-forms but much less for humans. We can find ways to survive such change. Just not forever. Eventually, we will go extinct. All species do. This reality has been called the first law of paleontology. The average longevity of animal species appears to be around two million years, at least for taxonomic groups for which the phenomenon has been well studied. If we consider just our species, Homo sapiens, that means we may still have some time.  Homo sapiens evolved roughly two hundred thousand years ago. We are still a young species. This suggests that if we last an average amount of time, our road is still long. On the other hand, it is the youngest species that are most at risk of extinction. Like puppies, big-eyed and not yet wise, young species are prone to fatal mistakes.”                                                                                                 continued . . .

All over the country, the weather has been wacky. Flooding. Snowstorms. Hail. Fires. Tornadoes. Extreme winds. (And the expanded hurricane season has not yet begun.) It's enough to make you run and hide.  

But it is also no surprise. The recent IPCC climate report made it very clear that we are going to have to move away from fossil fuels rapidly and that farms, forests, woodlands, wetlands, and grasslands are an important part of the natural climate solution.

As shared by The Nature Conservancy, "the latest IPCC report shows greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and current plans to address climate change are not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — a threshold scientists believe is necessary to avoid even more catastrophic impacts."

The key is to remember that natural climate solutions are central to pulling climate polluting gasses from the air. They can help reduce the impacts of extreme weather. And they can provide for better production of food, assist with plant and animal survival, and improve water quality.

But we must also realize that we will need to support these natural climate change solutions by finding ways to increase energy conservation and move to renewables. Soon. 

It will take a dual approach. And it will take leadership to reshape expectations and redefine what is considered conservation work.

Research is documenting the opportunities, and the challenges, of our response to climate change. Change won't happen by chance. But neither will land and water conservation. Let’s make the changes we need happen. 
​                                                                             --Judy Anderson, Community Consultants, LLC*

​*Judy Anderson has worked in land conservation since the mid-1980s. She offers a free bi-monthly climate change eNewsletter. Each month, one issue focuses on research related to the impacts of climate change, plus tips on climate communication; the other issue features land trusts taking action to slow climate change. Sign up on her website (community-consultants.com), where you will also find a wide range of articles organized by topic. This post was reprinted from her most recent (April 2022)  eNewsletter’s introduction, with permission.