Civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment have always been my main concerns, and I lived through times of great progress. I remember, as a child, watching all of it — from Selma to Earth Day. Some of the people who are dismantling the progress must have been watching too. You need to be at least 70 years old to remember the protests, the music, the three assassinations that forever weakened America, the immoral war that used my classmates like firewood, the struggle between closing or widening the divisions that tear us apart.
But the policy victories were great. As an environmental science student in the 1970s, I was thrilled to see one piece of major legislation after another signed into law. The Clean Air Act. Clean Water Act. Toxic Substances Control Act. Endangered Species Act. Fishery Conservation and Management Act. America understood the problems. America cared. America was fixing the broken, polluting pipes of its leaking future. My future. And America was leading the world by example.
And now things are going backward. The following brief retrospective of just a few things will illustrate the point.
After the EPA issued limits on emissions in 2024, mercury levels in fish began falling. In February, that action was reversed.
Living on the Atlantic coast, I fish and eat our catch. Mercury has long been a concern. My blood level has been high at times. Mercury is an impurity in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Coal smokestacks are where the mercury in our fish comes from. In 2012 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued air standards that cut mercury emissions by 90 percent and emissions of other metals by 80 percent. Mercury levels in fish began falling. In 2024 the EPA further strengthened those rules, setting stricter limits. But early in 2026, the EPA undid the 2024 standards, allowing more mercury and metals into the air. The Trump Administration has extended subsidies and issued orders to prop up our coal-burning comrades and has given 68 coal plants a two-year exemption from complying with mercury standards. Burning coal also results in the toxic sludge called coal ash, which has also been regulated. But in 2026, the EPA announced it was relaxing monitoring and extending cleanup of coal ash sites by up to three years.
In February, the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced cancellation of the agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health by driving climate change —the so-called “endangerment finding.” No longer will emissions be regulated. Among other things, this ends the basis for tailpipe carbon standards for cars and trucks. The EPA’s authority to regulate those emissions had been confirmed by the 2007 Supreme Court. Like so much else, that hardly matters now.
Demonstrators gather for the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, at Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Associated Press
The administration has also ordered stops to fully permitted wind projects, and leases for offshore wind turbines off the East Coast have been canceled. Courts have repeatedly rejected the pretext: “national security.” As one energy analyst said about these cancellations without due process, “That’s not a wind problem. It’s a rule-of-law problem for every capital-intensive energy project in federal waters or on federal land.”
The White House, also in early 2026, issued an executive order ramping up production of the highly contentious herbicide glyphosate, used in Roundup and a mainstay of agricultural pesticides. The reason given, the usual: “national defense.” Fights over glyphosate have resulted in a nearly $300-million win in the U.S. against its maker, Monsanto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who had been a lawyer for the plaintiff against Monsanto in that suit and is now our nation’s Secretary of Health, did a spin worthy of an ice-skating gold medal and praised the EPA for safeguarding “our defense readiness and our food supply.” Glyphosate’s maker Bayer may start paying out $7.25 billion to settle tens of thousands of claims that Roundup caused cancer. But the Supreme Court may soon shield pesticide makers, even though the major paper that in 2000 found the herbicide safe despite its links to cancer was retracted in February because Monsanto appears to have had a hidden hand in the study.
When I was 12, I caught a bluefin tuna (mine was a baby; they can reach 1,500 pounds). Its strength and beauty shocked me.
Pesticides and agriculture affect birds, as we’ve known since Rachel Carson’s monumental 1962 book, Silent Spring. I have raised, trained, studied, written about, and worked to protect birds from the time I was a small child to today. Across the U.S. and tropics, birds continue declining, at rates that are accelerating. In North America we’ve lost one-third of our birds since I was in high school. The main driver is agriculture’s expansion and its practices. In South America birds are declining even in intact forest, likely due to changing climate and moisture patterns.
When I was 12 years old, I caught a bluefin tuna (mine was a baby; they can reach 1,500 pounds). Its strength and beauty shocked me. By the early ’90s they had become a deeply depleted animal on the U.S. side of the Atlantic. Their East Atlantic and Mediterranean population had suffered a violent contraction in range, disappearing from the North Sea and British Isles. I set my sights on reversing their decline. In 1993 I published in Conservation Biology a cover article titled, “Bluefin Tuna in the West Atlantic: Negligent Management and the Making of an Endangered Species.” I followed that with a petition to list the species as endangered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which would have ended the export that had driven their depletion. The threat of listing leveraged catch limits down and enforcement up. Years of writing and further fighting followed, joined by top scientists and skilled advocates. Efforts to restrict catches and enforce quotas succeeded so well that their Atlantic populations, assessed as “endangered” in 2011 and 2015 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, had by 2021 been assessed as “least concern.” A remarkable turnaround, very evident in my home waters off New York. A spectacular success of policy and international cooperation.
Volunteers clean a beach near Santa Barbara following an infamous spill in January 1969. Photo by UPI / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
In 2025, recreational catches overshot the quota, and by August the federal fisheries agency closed the fishery. Fishermen complained. So, early in 2026 in what could be called Operation Rogue, Rogue, Rogue Our Boats, the U.S. announced to the international Atlantic tuna commission (whose agreements we are party to and bound by) that the U.S. would no longer count our very substantial recreational catches against our quota limits. Swift objections to the U.S. announcement were filed by Japan, Canada, the European Union, and several environmental groups including mine. The species is clearly quite sensitive, its populations responsive to fishing pressure whether high or low. I have no desire to see a return to the bad old days. We will reengage.
These are just a few of many things of going backwards. If you want additions and updates to this very partial gazette of recent U.S. federal decisions, search the internet for “environmental rollbacks” or “conservation rollbacks.” My jottings are just a taste.
One more thing. This week, the Trump Administration summarily exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from any considerations of the Endangered Species Act. As its war against Iran sent oil prices skyrocketing, the administration had activated the “God Squad,” a committee with the power to determine whether a species lives or dies, making the bogus claim that the Endangered Species Act somehow impedes the flow of domestic oil.
Times change, but the imperatives of human dignity, a life worth living, and the needs of nature remain.
Fact is, with the act in place, the U.S. has been pumping more oil than any other nation. Though it focuses only on preventing extinction rather than ensuring abundance, the act has nonetheless during the last half-century proven crucial time and again in preventing needless extinctions while almost never actually preventing work from getting accomplished. Having seen and chronicled the summer of chaos in the Gulf following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout, I can say that what the Gulf and its fishing and tourist economies — and endangered whales and turtles — don’t need is an excuse for carelessness about oil drilling.
I don’t recognize America now, but neither does anyone else. The two-party system’s back-and-forth valence always resulted in a woozy stability, but now the swings are wild. The presidency bounces term to term between polar opposites, the Congress flips and spasms and locks up. We don’t know who we are, and we cannot decide.
It’s been said that a house divided cannot stand. One wonders where all the unraveling will put us in terms of the things and the rights I’ve always cared about, the people who are not White men, the living beings who are not people, and the simplicities of healthy air and water.
But those struggles are centuries old, and they will never go away. Times change, but the imperatives of human dignity, a life worth living, and the needs of nature remain. The good thing about bad times is that when times change, things will improve. And if all of history is any indication, a change is gonna come.
