October 2026 Newsletter

A Tribute to Wendell Berry

Photo by Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On August 31, we lost another giant. Wendell Berry was a novelist, poet, farmer, and environmental activist who devoted his life to reminding us of what truly matters. He had a rare gift for putting into words the deeper truths of our relationship with one another and with the natural world.

At a time when so much feels chaotic, and when life is too often reduced to a line on a balance sheet to be measured, consumed, and exploited with an added dose of cruelty or indifference in the pursuit of wealth. Berry offered a different way of seeing. He reminded us that the natural world has value beyond what we can extract from it. That a healthy landscape, a thriving community, and the creatures great and small with whom we share this planet are not commodities, but essential parts of a meaningful life.

If you are like me, there are times when the news and the state of the world can leave you feeling anxious or discouraged. At those moments, I often look for ways to ground myself – hang out with our animals, play in the garden, take a walk in the woods, or read something inspiring. Wendell Berry’s writing has a way of slowing us down, grounding us in the world around us, and reminding us that there are things of enduring value that cannot and should not be measured on a balance sheet.

Perhaps, in these unsettled times, a little Wendell Berry is just what we need. He will be missed but his writings will endure – what a legacy to leave for future generations.

Climate Cooling Initiative Launches to Advance Nature-Based Climate Cooling

CBI is proud to be a core member of the Climate Cooling Initiative and to contribute our expertise in conservation science, spatial analysis, and collaborative tools to this important global effort.

Last week, the Climate Cooling Initiative (CCI) announced the launch of a new international effort to protect, restore, and strengthen Earth’s natural climate-cooling systems at a scale commensurate with the global climate challenge.

CCI’s work is grounded in an important new synthesis paper, Cooling Climate Quickly: A New Perspective Yields New Options. The paper presents evidence that the degradation and loss of healthy, functioning ecosystems have contributed significantly to global warming—and, importantly, that restoring these ecosystems could help recover some of their lost climate-cooling capacity.

The opportunity is enormous. By bringing together science, ecological restoration, finance, policy, and implementation, CCI aims to accelerate the protection and restoration of natural ecosystems around the world. Restoring forests, wetlands, grasslands, soils, and other ecosystems can help moderate some of the impacts of climate change while the global transition away from fossil fuels continues to unfold over the coming decades.

The benefits extend far beyond climate. Restoring functioning ecosystems can also help address the global biodiversity crisis, improve soil and water health, strengthen ecosystem resilience, and sustain the many services that nature provides to people.

Nature has already been doing this work for us for millennia. The challenge and opportunity is to restore and strengthen that capacity at a scale that can make a meaningful difference.

Feed the Bugs to Feed the Bats: Building a National Framework for Bat-Friendly Gardening

You’ve heard of gardening for pollinators, but what should people plant if they want to help bats? CBI recently wrapped up a project with Bat Conservation International to provide a stronger scientific foundation for this perhaps unexpected conservation question. Because most of the 47 bat species in the US are insectivorous, the connection between a garden and a bat is often indirect. Native plants support insects, and those insects, in turn, provide the prey that bats depend on. This project, led by CBI ecologist Chris Cosma, brought those pieces together into a national framework linking plants, arthropods, and bats through their ecological interactions.

The result is an integrated database containing more than one million spatially-explicit plant-arthropod-bat interactions across the conterminous United States. The database combines bat diet records, plant-insect interactions, species distributions, ecological traits, and other information to build regional food webs and rank native plants according to their potential to support the bats occurring in a particular area. The project also provided Bat Conservation International with prototype interactive tools and downloadable ecoregional planting guides that demonstrate how this information can be translated into practical recommendations for gardeners and land managers.

The results provide encouraging support for the basic idea behind bat gardening. Nearly two-thirds of species-level bat prey associations involved insects or other arthropods with documented plant relationships, suggesting that plant choice can influence a substantial portion of the food base available to bats. Moths were especially important links between the two trophic levels. At the national scale, maples (Acer), cottonwoods and aspens (Populus), cherries and plums (Prunus), willows (Salix), and oaks (Quercus) emerged among the most consistently highly ranked plant genera, although the best choices vary substantially among ecoregions.

Overall, the project provides a strong foundation for a data-driven approach to bat gardening in the US, with important next steps focused on continued data additions, field validations, and the development of public-facing tools tailored to homeowners, restoration practitioners, and other end users.

Ultimately, the goal is to turn an increasingly rich body of ecological data into something people can act on—helping them choose the right plants in the right places to support insects, bats, and the food webs connecting them.

Public Land Abuses Keep Making Headlines

The assault on federal public lands and wild places is unprecedented. Below is a roundup of some of the major stories so far this year—it has been difficult to keep up.

Border Wall in Big Bend National Park

In early August 2026, bulldozers began ripping through native vegetation and sensitive ecosystems near one of most iconic and ecologically delicate landscapes. The administration waived more than 30 environmental and historic-preservation laws and authorized a $1.7 billion project to construct 17 miles of vehicle barriers, pave patrol roads, and install massive surveillance infrastructure.

Status: The project was officially paused on August 17, 2026, following bipartisan opposition from a large and diverse coalition of stakeholders.

Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante

The administration issued proclamations dramatically shrinking Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument aggressively downsizing the monuments by over 90 percent of their original sizes, cutting nearly 3 million combined acres that are now open to mining and development.

Status: The new designations formally take effect September 11, although private companies have already begun staking mining claims. Federal crews have removed gateway monument signs, and the Tribal Co-Management executive body has been dissolved. Legal action is pending and is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court.

National Forest Roadless Rule

The administration has officially initiated a final administrative push to dismantle the 25-year-old conservation National Forest Roadless Rule, stripping protections from roughly 59 million acres of intact national forests lands (including the Tongass National Forest) to permit logging, roads, and industrial activity.

Status: A 30-day public comment window is currently open, running from August 18 through midnight on September 21, 2026. This is the final opportunity for the public to weigh in via Regulations.gov before the rescission can be finalized.

Oil and Gas Leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The administration reinstated canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and advanced plans to remove conservation safeguards from 13 million acres of Alaska’s Western Arctic.

Status: New leasing in the refuge has begun, but so far has had limited industry interest. Legal challenges are underway by a broad coalition of indigenous and conservation organizations.

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota

On April 27, 2026, President Trump signed H.J. Res. 140 into law. Congress used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) in an unprecedented 50-49 Senate vote to permanently erase a 20-year mining moratorium covering 225,000 acres of federal lands in the Superior National Forest. The bill effectively allows copper-nickel mining proposals (primarily by Twin Metals Minnesota which is wholly owned by Antofagasta, a large Chilean mining conglomerate) to move forward in the wilderness headwaters.

Status: In a major escalation on August 18, 2026, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued a sweeping Executive Order to checkmate the federal rollback. While the federal land is technically open, the state-level freeze has ground corporate mining ambitions to a halt for the foreseeable future.

Connecticut Statewide Wildlife Connectivity

Not every story is about the loss of protections. Across the country, wildlife is increasingly forced to navigate a fragmented landscape of roads and development. As many as 2 million wildlife-vehicle collisions involving large mammals occur in the United States each year, approximately 70% involving deer. Tens of millions of medium-sized mammals and hundreds of millions of birds are also killed in collisions. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, vehicle collisions consistently rank among the top five causes of bird mortality in the nation.

Working closely with The Nature Conservancy, the Connecticut Department of Transportation, and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, CBI will be conducting a statewide wildlife connectivity and vehicle-risk assessment.

The goal is to identify locations where targeted interventions can significantly reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions, lower mortality across a wide range of species, and prevent crashes that result in property damage, injuries, and deaths.

This work offers an important reminder: protecting wildlife is not only about preserving remote wilderness. It also means reconnecting the landscapes between us and creating safer passage for wildlife across the places where people and nature increasingly overlap.

QGIS Users Wanted: Help Beta Test New Data Basin Feature

CBI is currently seeking QGIS users to participate as beta testers for a highly requested feature from the Data Basin user community.

Data Basin now supports importing a variety of QGIS vector dataset styles, including simple fills, graduated colors, and categorized styles. Supported data formats include Shapefile, File Geodatabase, GeoJSON, and GeoPackage.

Next, CBI’s programming team is working to expand support for additional vector styles and raster datasets. Once these enhancements are stable, we will turn our attention to enabling direct data downloads in QGIS format.

If you use QGIS and would be interested in helping us test these new capabilities, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact Nik Stevenson-Molnar at nik.molnar@consbio.org.

Another Record-Breaking Summer: What Can We Do to Slow the Impacts from Climate Change?

It is hard to avoid experiencing, or at least hearing about, the devastating, record-breaking heat waves that have gripped the Northern Hemisphere this summer, punctuated by severe storms and massive wildfires. Europe’s historic heat waves have already claimed thousands of lives, with the majority of victims in France, Germany, and Belgium. Wildfires burning across France, Spain, and Portugal are breaking modern records, and fires are now spreading into Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

Closer to home, eastern Oregon and Washington are facing their own crisis, with millions of acres burning and severe losses to homes and businesses. Spokane has been hit hardest: as of August 4th, the Spokane Complex Fire has destroyed more than 700 structures, forced the evacuation of roughly 65,000 residents, and remains at 0% containment. Smoke alerts now blanket nearly all of both states, reaching the major populations in Portland and Seattle.

Fire is a natural part of the Pacific Northwest’s ecology, but its frequency and severity have gotten measurably worse. Area burned has more than doubled over the past 25 years compared to the 1955–1999 baseline, and the link to climate change isn’t speculative — the mechanism is direct and well understood. Warming temperatures shrink snowpack and push snowmelt earlier in the spring, leaving forests and soils dry for longer stretches of the year. Drier fuels burn hotter and spread faster. Fire season now starts earlier and ends later, widening the window in which fires can ignite and spread. And nighttime heat events, which were once rare, are becoming more common: cooler nights used to slow fires down and give firefighters a chance to gain the upper hand, but warmer nights now let fires burn hot around the clock.

So, what do we do? Most climate reports understandably focus on the necessary global actions — transitioning away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy as quickly as possible. But even assuming the world can sustain meaningful progress despite the dramatic policy reversal underway in the United States, the benefits of that transition would only be felt on a timescale of several decades, if not centuries.

Is there anything that can buy us time while those larger-scale changes take hold? Given the sheer scale of the climate problem, most scientists and policy advocates have understandably focused on the big fix. But there’s a complementary set of actions that could improve local and regional conditions on a timescale of years to decades, not generations. Living systems cool the planet in ways that conventional carbon accounting largely ignores. Maintaining and restoring the integrity of natural ecosystems delivers climate benefits that are more immediate, more local, and often just as consequential.

What’s needed now is decisive policy action: to halt further ecosystem degradation, and to create real incentives for local communities to restore what’s already been degraded and protect the lands that still maintain their ecological integrity. Ecosystem restoration is where local self-interest and global necessity converge. It is a place where immediate, tangible climate benefits for communities can buy humanity the time it needs for larger-scale greenhouse gas reductions to take full effect.

An Ecoregional Conservation Assessment for the Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion

The Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion of southwestern Oregon and northwestern California is one of the most botanically diverse temperate coniferous forest regions in the world, recognized as a Center for Plant Diversity by the World Wildlife Fund and IUCN. Its uniqueness stems largely from geologic age and stability: the region escaped Pleistocene glaciation, allowing it to serve as a refugium where ancient plant lineages persisted and diversified over time. This history is compounded by an unusually complex and varied geology with serpentine, peridotite, granite, and metamorphic substrates all in close proximity creating a mosaic of soil chemistries and microclimates found almost nowhere else.

That combination of rugged terrain, ice-age stability, and geologic diversity has produced outstanding biological richness. The region is a recognized center of floristic diversity with high rates of narrow species endemism, supporting a continental maximum of conifer species — over 30, including seven endemics — alongside exceptional mollusk, butterfly, bee, and amphibian richness. Its species-rich herpetofauna and remaining old-growth stands make it one of the last strongholds for old-growth-dependent wildlife such as Pacific fisher and Northern Spotted Owl.

Large public land ownership and relatively intact landscapes have also allowed the region’s mammal fauna to hold on and, in some cases, recover: 69 mammal species call the Klamath-Siskiyou home, including a rebounding elk population and a growing gray wolf population. Below the surface, its rivers are just as remarkable: nine native salmonid and trout species make the Klamath-Siskiyou one of the most significant and most imperiled salmonid strongholds in the West.

Given all this, it’s no surprise the region has drawn sustained conservation attention. In fact, a comprehensive ecoregional conservation assessment of the Klamath-Siskiyou was one of CBI’s very first projects, published in 1999. An updated assessment, led by CBI Associate Dr. Dominick DellaSala, was recently published in the journal Diversity, with a sharpened focus on the compounding threats of climate change and its associated disturbances, including wildfire. Like its 1999 predecessor, the new study calls for expanded protections both to safeguard the region’s extraordinary biota and to preserve it as a refuge from the more severe effects of a changing climate.

Blue Mountains and East Cascade Conservation Assessments

Similar to the Klamath-Siskiyou assessment and as part of the North America Forest Initiative, CBI is now beginning two new ecoregional assessments for the Blue Mountains and East Cascades in Oregon.

Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains, which is one of the largest ecoregions in the state, stretches across the northeastern part of the state, encompassing the Wallowa, Elkhorn, Strawberry, and Ochoco mountain ranges alongside Hells Canyon and the Columbia Basin ecoregion on its southern edge. The ecoregion is geologically remarkable, with rocks in its western portion dating back over 300 million years and Cenozoic deposits at the John Day Fossil Beds preserving an exceptional plant and vertebrate fossil record.

Habitats range from desert-like shrublands and bluebunch wheatgrass grasslands to ponderosa pine forests and alpine highlands, and the region harbors some of North America’s largest remaining old-growth forest stands. Ecologically, its value lies in some of the state’s largest intact native grasslands and fire-adapted ponderosa pine woodlands that depend on frequent, low-severity burns to maintain the mosaic habitat structure that supports species like white-headed woodpeckers and flammulated owls. The region supports a rich wildlife assemblage with a mix of iconic large mammals (elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, pronghorn and American black bear), notable birds, and returning predators (gray wolf and wolverine). Chinook salmon, steelhead, redband trout, bull trout, and Pacific lamprey are found in the region’s river systems.

Conservation concerns center on a legacy of roads and fragmentation from decades of resource extraction and recently released draft plan by the U.S. Forest Service to triple the commercial timber output, eliminate old-growth protections, and open hundreds of thousands of acres of roadless areas to logging.

East Cascades Ecoregion

Running the full north-south length of Oregon along the drier, rain-shadowed east side of the Cascade Range, this ecoregion transitions from cool, moist forest bordering the West Cascades to dry high desert at its eastern edge. Its volcanic history is written into the landscape through buttes, lava flows, craters, and lava caves, along with deep ash deposits from historical eruptions. Ecologically, its standout features include massive old-growth ponderosa pine stands and its exceptional habitat changes over short distances resulting in rapid shifts in species assemblages (beta diversity). Despite an overall drier climate with fewer streams than the West Cascades, the region’s abundant lakes, reservoirs, and marshes provide outstanding habitat for waterbirds, amphibians, fish, and aquatic invertebrates. The southern portion of the ecoregion (draining toward the Klamath River) intersects one of the most significant wetland complexes in the West though a high percentage of the Klamath Basin’s historic wetlands have already been converted.

Together, these two ecoregions bracket a broad ecological gradient from the Blue Mountains’ fire-dependent montane forests and grasslands to the East Cascades’ volcanic, water-rich transitional zone making them complementary priorities for connectivity planning. Work is underway and expected to be completed by the end of the year.

The Bee and the Overdraft

Last week brought National Pollinator Week, a modest nod to the bees, butterflies, and moths that quietly make roughly 75 percent of our food crops possible. And let’s not forget birds, bats, and even rodents. Later this month comes a very different kind of marker: Earth Overshoot Day, now July 30, the date when humanity’s demand on nature outruns what the planet can regenerate in a year. From this date to the end of December, we’re living on borrowed biological capital.

At first glance, these two observances seem to belong to very different conversations — one a celebration of small, specific creatures, the other a sobering piece of planetary accounting. But they’re really telling the same story from opposite ends.

Overshoot is a global figure built from billions of local decisions about land and use. Pollinators live that story locally: a bee doesn’t care about hectares of biocapacity, only whether there’s undisturbed soil to nest in or a stretch of yard that hasn’t seen pesticides. The overdraft we’re running as a species is, in part, the sum of landscapes we’ve made increasingly inhospitable to the organisms that keep them functioning.

The biggest gains will come from energy systems, agricultural policy, and global supply chains – not yards. But overshoot isn’t only a policy problem; it is also a local landscape problem, and landscapes are made of yards, roadsides, business parks, and vacant lots that ordinary people and communities have direct influence over. A few places to start:

• Let part of the yard go a little wild. Unmanicured soil and leaf litter are habitat, not neglect — most native bees nest in the ground.
• Convert a portion of your lawn to a diversity of flowering plants, so something’s blooming spring through fall.
• Skip the chemicals, even the “safe-sounding” broad-spectrum kinds. They rarely distinguish between the pest and the pollinator.
• Add water: Provide a simple birdbath or shallow water dish with rocks so animals can land and drink safely.
• Dim the outdoor lights. Artificial light at night disrupts moths and other nocturnal pollinators more than most people realize.
• Support the policies and organizations doing this at scale — habitat restoration, farmland conservation, and the kind of connectivity planning that lets wildlife move through a landscape rather than being boxed into fragments.

None of this alone moves Earth Overshoot Day. But the intention behind it — restoring a little untidiness, a little wildness, a little tolerance for the organisms we’ve spent a century engineering out of view — is precisely what Earth overshoot asks us to recover. The date on the calendar is a global ledger. The yard is where many of us can actually get to make a deposit. 

For more information on what you can do to your own yards

• NWF’s native plant finder
• Pollinator Pathway 
• Pollinator Partnership (especially their ecoregional planting guides)
• CBI’s Conservation Reserve Program Plant Finder and Vendor Match
• Ecoregional Revegetation Application

CBI to Attend Upcoming United Nations International Meetings

CBI will also be represented at two major United Nations convention meetings.

At the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (August 2026), CBI will co-organize an official side event with Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries on restoring agricultural and forest soils. 

At the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) summit in Yerevan, Armenia (October 2026), CBI has proposed an official side event on wildfire resilience and biodiversity protection, co-organized with IUCN and proposed participation from partner ministries in Colombia, Cambodia, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe.

CBI has also been invited to participate in additional pending side events highlighting links between biodiversity and human health, and Indigenous-led approaches for improving forest health.

These events reflect a broader strategy to strengthen international cooperation on wildfire resilience. Through the Global Wildfire Collective, CBI has proposed a Joint Work Programme on Wildfire Resilience under the CBD, UNCCD, and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The proposal has received written support from 36 National Focal Points representing 30 Parties to date, with interest continuing to grow. Building on this momentum, CBI is now exploring opportunities for capacity building for national ministries through the GWC Academy to help translate international commitments into practical action.  Watch this space for more.

CBI Welcomes Our Newest Board Member, Priyal Patel

Priyal Patel brings a foundation in environmental policy and finance to the CBI board, with an early stage career focused on directing corporate efforts toward conservation, climate resilience, and sustainability. 

How the Environment Became a Culture War,
And Why It Doesn’t Have to Be

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. James Strittholt

When I was in high school, environmental protection was a non-partisan issue in America. Richard Nixon — second only to Theodore Roosevelt in environmental impact — created the EPA, supported the first Earth Day, and signed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act. Announcing the ESA, he declared, “Nothing is more precious and worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.” Conservation enjoyed broad bipartisan support, a tradition George H.W. Bush continued as well.

The modern Republican Party has become the antithesis of these policies. So, what happened?

Reagan’s presidency marked the turning point. His campaign against federal regulation pulled environmental protection into the broader debate about government’s role in the economy. Business interests began framing environmental rules as job-killers and government overreach — an argument with real traction in rural mining, manufacturing, and logging communities that trend conservative. That framing persists to this day.

By the 1990s and 2000s, environmentalism became associated with urban liberals, even as many conservatives maintained a deep personal relationship with the land. Fossil fuel industries, facing existential regulatory threats, invested heavily in think tanks, lobbying, and deliberate doubt-manufacturing about climate science — tactics strikingly similar to those used by the tobacco industry decades earlier. The goal was never to win a scientific argument, but to create enough confusion to prevent action.

And yet the underlying values never actually divided along party lines. Polls consistently show that majorities across party lines support clean air, clean water, national parks, and specific environmental protections when asked about them on their own merits. The polarization is largely a political and media phenomenon projected onto ordinary voters. The word “environmentalism” became a partisan label detached from the genuine desires beneath it, and that gap is where enormous common ground was lost.

We don’t have to accept that loss as permanent. Love of land, clean water, and wild places has never truly belonged to one party. It belongs to anyone who has fed backyard birds, cast a fishing line, or simply wanted their children to inherit a world as beautiful as the one they were given. That American commitment never really disappeared. It’s just waiting to be called by its right name.

Global Wildfire Collective News

Conservation Biology Institute’s Global Wildfire Collective (GWC) initiative recently received funding to pursue its proposed FIRE-NET project. The project aims to operationalize and expand the GWC as a hub for accelerating wildfire resilience and recovery by enabling responsible knowledge transfer across fire-prone regions globally. Core research objectives include co-producing region- and ecoregion-specific resilience roadmaps that integrate scientific, indigenous, practitioner, and community expertise; developing a scalable Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) typology and probabilistic fire occurrence models to identify generalizable patterns versus context-dependent dynamics; and building a standardized foundation of measurements, models, and strategies applicable across diverse biomes. The project will also work to expand open-access digital infrastructure (including the GWC Spatial Data Gateway, multilingual Discussion Forum, and AI-supported Knowledge Base), and deliver capacity-building programs such as webinars, regional workshops, and policy engagement at the UN level.

Beyond research outputs, the project seeks to foster a durable international collaborative platform that bridges science, policy, and practice — particularly by connecting underrepresented regions such as Colombia and Chile with well-studied fire systems in the Western U.S. — ultimately advancing equitable, culturally grounded solutions to shared global wildfire challenges. Together, these activities span ecological, social, technological, and governance dimensions of wildfire resilience, positioning the Global Wildfire Collective as a central platform for integrated wildfire science worldwide.

Administered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, this research is funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Fire Science Innovations through Research and Education (FIRE) program, a collaboration among NSF, NASA, Department of Defense SERDP/ESTCP, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to advance wildland fire research.

Expanding Our Ocean of Knowledge: Two New Gateways on the Horizon

Our marine resource planning network is growing. Two new Data Basin Gateways — covering the Territory of American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — are currently in development and expected to launch before year’s end.

The effort is part of an ongoing partnership with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which has been instrumental in bringing marine-focused gateways to life across the Pacific. Alongside the new additions, BOEM-supported gateways already serve California offshore wind planning, Alaska seascapes, and Guam’s offshore resources. Stay tuned for official launch announcements.

Earth Day at 56: Hope, Fatigue, and the Fight Ahead

On April 22, the 56th Earth Day was celebrated under the theme “Our Power, Our Planet.” I am old enough to remember the first one. I was in 8th grade in 1970, and I greeted that day with genuine excitement and hope. About 20 million Americans poured into the streets that early Spring day, and the modern environmental movement was born.

Much has changed in 56 years, and not all of it discouraging. Earth Day’s original vision was never just a single day of awareness — it was a catalyst for something larger. By many measures, that vision took root. Renewable energy is on the rise, recycling is commonplace, our air and water are measurably cleaner than they were in 1970, and some endangered species have pulled back from the brink. The moment has become a movement.

This year’s celebration drew over 10,000 events globally, and yet something still felt diminished. The clarion call that once rattled the halls of Congress now echoes in a crowded, distracted landscape.

Part of that is the current political headwinds. The federal government rolled back over 400 environmental protections in 2025 alone and withdrew from multiple international climate treaties and accords. Advocates describe burnout and an overwhelming sense that crises are arriving faster than solutions. That fatigue is real, and it matters because sustained movements run on hope as much as passion.

Which brings us to the harder question: are we keeping pace with the crisis? The honest answer is no. Culture change and market forces move on a timeline measured in decades. Many of the environmental crises we face (e.g., wildfire season expansion, species loss, and coral bleaching) operate on a timeline measured in years. Annual awareness campaigns, symbolic gestures, and social media moments were never going to be sufficient on their own. The movement’s task now is to convert its broad cultural reach into the kind of durable, systemic political pressure that actually bends the curve in the positive direction.

So far, it hasn’t moved fast enough. But I want to leave you with a reason to keep going.

Republicans entered this Earth Day with plans to dramatically weaken the Endangered Species Act. The vote was abruptly pulled from the floor because there weren’t enough votes to pass it, including among some Republicans. That is the cultural evolution of the original Earth Day vision at work, the people holding the line.

We have lost ground. But the fight continues, and what comes next matters enormously. The power, as this year’s theme reminds us, is still ours.

Recreation Impacts on Tribal Rights in Washington State – An Update

Outdoor recreation in the U.S. generated $1.1 trillion in economic output in 2022 and added $564 billion to the nation’s GDP. It has become not just a major industry, but a recognized driver of government conservation strategies — valued for the health, cultural, and ecological benefits it delivers alongside its economic power.

But a growing body of evidence complicates that picture. Outdoor recreation carries real ecological costs: soil compaction and water pollution, vegetation loss and the spread of invasive species, and documented disruption to wildlife behavior, stress levels, and survival. The outdoors that people seek out is, in many cases, being quietly diminished by the volume of people seeking it.

The impacts extend beyond ecology. Tribes across the western U.S. have raised urgent and well-founded concerns about the erosion of their traditional rights on public lands — rights increasingly compromised by the expansion of recreational use into culturally and spiritually significant places.

From August 2024 through December 2025, CBI worked in close partnership with numerous treaty tribes in Washington and state natural resource agencies to address this challenge directly. Together, they developed a map-based analytical framework for assessing environmental and social risks from current and planned outdoor recreation on state lands with particular attention to tribal rights. The goal was practical: identify a pathway that preserves meaningful recreational access while meaningfully reducing harm.

Relying on Data Basin and EEMS modeling software, the work now expands. CBI is building on this foundation to deepen its conservation science and analytical support for the ongoing Tribal-State process, while broadening the effort to include federal agencies and additional partners. The aim is nothing less than a durable, collaborative solution to one of the most complex land-use challenges in the American West.

Global Wildfire Collective Update

The Global Wildfire Collective has had a remarkably active few months, with major milestones across research, policy, and education.

Forest Governance Lab for Wildfire Resilience, Ecuador
In mid-April, GWC co-organized the Forest Governance Lab for Wildfire Resilience — a workshop of the Wildfire Action Accelerator — alongside the Environmental Defense Fund, Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, and BirdLife International. This gathering brought renewed urgency to a critical moment: the Wildfire Action Accelerator Pledge had been launched at COP 30 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Belém, Brazil, in direct response to the global escalation of wildfires and their mounting toll on forests, communities, and the climate. Dr. Alexandra Syphard represented GWC at the event.

GWC Academy: Wildfire in Savanna Ecosystems
GWC held its fourth Academy webinar, focused on Wildfire in Savanna Ecosystems. The session featured an exceptional panel of researchers: Dr. Caroline Lehmann (Chair of Plant Ecology and Biogeography, University of Edinburgh / Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh), Dr. Abigail Croker (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Centre for BioComplexity, High Meadows Environmental Institute), Amos Chege Muthiuru (PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, King’s College London), and Dr. Sally Archibald (Professor, School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand). A recording is available for those who missed it.

FireData Regional Workshop, Brasília
GWC was invited by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) to participate in a mid-May Regional Workshop on Data and Information for Integrated Fire Management in the Amazon (FireData) in Brasília, Brazil. The workshop aims to strengthen technical exchange and regional cooperation on data systems and information platforms for Integrated Fire Management across the Amazon region. Dr. Alexandra Syphard will represent GWC at the event.

Inaugural Fire Modeling Literacy Workshop — Register Now
On June 24–25, 2026, GWC will host its inaugural Fire Modeling Literacy for Risk-Informed Decision-Making workshop — and registration is now open.
Leading researchers from the GWC community will go beyond the surface of fire modeling frameworks, revealing not just what each approach can accomplish, but where its limits lie and why those boundaries matter. Through comparative case studies, participants will come to understand a fundamental truth of fire science: there is no single “best” model — only tools matched, or mismatched, to the problem at hand.

Over two days and four hours of sessions, participants will:

• Establish a shared fire modeling vocabulary
• Gain exposure to machine learning, fire behavior, and simulation modeling frameworks
• Build foundational literacy in the modeling process
• Improve familiarity with common data sources and limitations
• Strengthen interpretation and decision framing under uncertainty

Welcome Steve Schwarzbach – CBI Welcomes Our Newest Board Member

Dr. Steven E. Schwarzbach is an ecologist and former federal science executive with extensive experience in environmental research, organizational leadership, and public-sector governance. He served as Center Director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center, where he led multidisciplinary teams addressing complex natural resource challenges across California and the western United States.

Prior to joining the USGS, Dr. Schwarzbach spent more than a decade with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, advancing research on environmental contaminants and their effects on wildlife and ecosystems, and later leading scientific programs that informed regulatory and management decisions.

Since retiring from federal service, Dr. Schwarzbach has remained active in regional conservation and resource management, including service on the El Dorado County Fish and Wildlife Commission and in leadership with the El Dorado Resource Conservation District. He brings to boards a combination of scientific rigor, strategic leadership, and a long-standing commitment to public service. We are thrilled he has chosen to join us!

Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich: A Tribute

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. James Strittholt.

Sagan left us in 1996. Last month, on March 13th, Paul Ehrlich followed, passing away at 93. He lived a remarkably full life authoring 50 books spanning topics from butterfly identification to ecological sustainability, and sparking one of the most important and contentious environmental conversations of the 20th century with his 1968 book The Population Bomb, co-authored with his wife Anne.

In the late 1970s, Ehrlich’s influence on my education became even more direct. My college textbook for Ecosystem Ecology was Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (1977), co-authored by the Ehrlichs and John Holdren. All 1,051 dense, substantive pages of it. Decades later, it still sits on my bookshelf and remains a foundational resource for understanding the physical and natural world and humanity’s path toward genuine sustainability.

If you want to hear Ehrlich at his most candid and unfiltered, I encourage you to seek out one of his final podcast interviews; for example, the interview he gave to Population Balance in 2022. He doesn’t hold back. And given where the world stands today, his words feel even more relevant than when he spoke them.

Some Good News for Endangered Species, but…

On Monday, March 30, 2026, a federal court in the Northern District of California delivered a significant victory for wildlife protection. The ruling, in a case brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and WildEarth Guardians (represented by Earthjustice) struck down regulations that had gutted the Endangered Species Act. Those regulations originated during the first Trump Administration and were only partially addressed by inadequate Biden-era rules. The ESA has enjoyed over 80 percent public approval for decades.

The court was unambiguous: federal agencies must use the best available science when assessing harm to species, cannot ignore incremental damage to critical habitat, and must take every measure to reduce harm to imperiled species.

The administration’s response was swift and extraordinary. The very next day, it convened the Endangered Species Committee (informally known as the “God Squad”) and used it to exempt Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas drilling from ESA protections, citing the ongoing conflict with Iran as a threat to domestic energy supplies. The God Squad, comprised of the Secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, and Army, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, and the administrators of the EPA and NOAA, was established in 1978 precisely for situations where no alternative could deliver equivalent economic benefit, or where the national interest demanded an exemption. In 53 years, the panel has granted only two exemptions — and only one was ever upheld, for a dam project on Wyoming’s Platte River that threatened the whooping crane.

Numerous marine species in the Gulf are now at increased risk. For example, Rice’s Whale, which was listed as endangered in 2019, has only 50 individuals remaining — its entire known range overlapping directly with Gulf drilling operations.

The Gulf’s track record with offshore drilling should give everyone pause. In 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout killed 11 workers and released 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, killing thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, and birds and contaminating 1,300 miles of shoreline. The disaster forced the closure of over a third of federal waters to fishing and cost the tourism and fishing industries billions of dollars. Earlier this month, a new spill spread oil across 373 miles of coastline.

Nonetheless, in mid-March the Trump administration approved BP’s new $5 billion ultra-deepwater drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico.

What could possibly go wrong?

Bats, Bugs, and Plants: CBI Partners with Bat Conservation International on a New Decision-Support Tool

We’re excited to announce a new collaboration between CBI and Bat Conservation International (BCI) to develop a national “bat gardening” tool. Led by CBI’s Ecologist Dr. Chris Cosma, the project will help users identify the most effective native plants for supporting bats in their region, following the logic that the right plants support the right insects, and the right insects support healthy bat communities. It’s a simple idea, made actionable through some genuinely complex science.

Under the hood, the tool will be built on a comprehensive, harmonized dataset linking bat species to their arthropod prey and those arthropods back to their native plant associations. Spatial modeling, phenology data, and phylogenetic relationships will be used to fill gaps in the observational record and build ecoregion-specific trophic networks, ultimately identifying keystone native plants that best support bat food webs in each part of the country. 

The final product will be accessible to conservation practitioners, land managers, and the general public alike, with the goal of making it easy for anyone to take meaningful action for one of North America’s most undervalued groups of wildlife. We’re thrilled to be working with the BCI team on this one, stay tuned for updates as the project gets underway!

New Publication by CBI’s Dr. Alexandra Syphard and Heather Rustigian-Rosmos

Where will California’s plants be able to survive as the climate changes — and what does that mean for the protected areas we rely on to conserve them? A new study co-authored by CBI’s Dr. Alexandra Syphard and Heather Rustigian-Romsos, published in PLOS ONE, tackles this question for the Golden Gate Biosphere Network, a high-biodiversity mosaic of habitats stretching along the central to northern California coast.

Using carefully constructed ensemble species distribution models, the team projected how suitable habitat for six dominant plant species might shift by late century. Their findings are a reminder that climate change doesn’t produce uniform outcomes: habitat may expand for some species while contracting for others, projected shifts don’t always move upslope or northward as commonly assumed, and soil conditions can be just as important as climate in determining where plants persist.

The paper also offers practical guidance for conservation managers working within fixed reserve boundaries — underscoring the value of identifying climate refugia and the importance of planning across scales, since conditions inside a protected area may not reflect what’s happening across a species’ broader range.

International Workshop of the Wildfire Action Accelerator
Forest Governance Lab for Wildfire Resilience

In light of the global escalation of wildfires and their growing impact on forests, communities, and the climate, the Wildfire Action Accelerator Pledge was launched during COP 30 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Belém, Brazil. This international commitment aims to strengthen fire governance in tropical regions through preventive approaches.

The Wildfire Action Accelerator Pledge is structured around four strategic pillars: i) the recognition and integration of traditional knowledge and the leadership of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities; ii) the incorporation of Integrated Fire Management into climate and forest policies; iii) the mobilization of sustainable financing for prevention and resilience; and iv) the strengthening of South–South and international cooperation.

Within this framework, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), in coordination with the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Ecuador and with the support of our partners BirdLife International and the Global Wildfire Collective, is pleased to announce its upcoming workshop: Wildfire Action Accelerator: Forest Governance Laboratory for Wildfire Resilience, which will take place from April 14 to 16, 2026, at the Hotel y Centro de Convenciones San José de Puembo, Quito, Ecuador.

This high-level technical and policy meeting will bring together government representatives, technical experts, and strategic stakeholders from the Amazon region to strengthen regional coordination and consolidate a platform for cooperation among initiatives, countries, and strategic partners on Integrated Fire Management.
 

THIS EVENT IS BY INVITATION ONLY
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ATTENDING, PLEASE EMAIL
INFO@GLOBALWILDFIRECOLLECTIVE.ORG

Some Hopeful News

For many months now, the lead story in our monthly newsletter has focused on one of the latest attacks on science and conservation posing serious threats to the sustainability of our planet. I was contemplating what would be the lead story this month – there seems to be an endless supply – but I found myself avoiding tackling the next installment of concerning news.

Then, I read an update on the Brazilian rainforest and felt a rush of genuine hope. So I decided to set my list of concerns aside and share some good news for a change in the hope you will feel some uplifting too. Indigenous communities vehemently opposed the Brazilian government giving access to the Tapajos River as an export corridor for animal feed plantations by giant agribusiness companies, which would likely have led to serious ecological impacts. Because of the commitment by local communities, the Brazilian government recently announced it will revoke the permit giving access to the river. In a statement by the Tapajos and Arapiuns Indigenous Council, “What won today was life. The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won.”

There is more good news – the Amazon hit its lowest deforestation rate in over a decade. In the past, gains in the Amazon usually came at the expense of the neighboring Cerrado savanna, but not this time. The deforestation rate there also declined.

These may be seen by some as minor victories in the fight to save life on this planet, but these are important victories. They have significant on-the-ground benefits that are worth celebrating. Additionally, it demonstrates how, at a time when the attack on the natural world by powerful forces seems overwhelming, the people can be catalysts for change and when they work with other decision makers can deliver big results. What else can we accomplish?

Draft Southern Sierra Nevada Fisher Habitat Dashboard Released

The Southern Sierra Nevada Fisher, a distinct population of the Pacific fisher (Pekania pennanti), was listed as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2020. CBI, led by Dr. Wayne Spencer as principle investigator, is coordinating a multi-agency initiative to conserve and recover the species, which faces ongoing threats from high-severity wildfire, habitat fragmentation, and rodenticide exposure. 

As part of an updated Conservation Assessment and Strategy of the species, the CBI team has developed an easy-to-use online dashboard to provide information on changes to fisher habitat from 1985 to 2024 based on a type of automated wildlife habitat monitoring system developed by scientists at the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station and collaborators called the “Living Maps”.

The draft dashboard includes three primary tabs…

Time Series
Users can visualize and graph suitable habitat, high-quality habitat, or both for a predefined region, user-drawn polygon, or uploaded boundary. The tool displays habitat trends from 1985 to 2024, with additional years to be incorporated as new Living Maps data become available. Results can be downloaded in both graphical and map formats.

Habitat & Connectivity
This section presents changes in fragmentation metrics relevant to fisher ecology across the seven principal habitat core areas, along with connectivity modeling results spanning the full 1985–2024 period across the broader region.

Best Habitat
Designed specifically for land managers, this tab identifies contiguous blocks of high-quality habitat that overlap a user-defined project area by at least 60 acres, supporting project planning and conservation prioritization.

Dr. Wayne D. Spencer – Recipient of the Raymond F. Dasmann Professional of the Year Award

At a recent meeting of the Western Section of the Wildlife Society, Dr. Wayne Spencer (long-time Senior Scientist at CBI) was awarded the Dasmann Award, which is the most prestigious award by the Society honoring wildlife professionals who have made an outstanding contribution to wildlife resources management and understanding in California, Nevada, Hawaii or Guam. A tremendous and well-deserved honor. Congratulations, Wayne!

Celebrating Our Associate, Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala

Fixing Forests or Fast-Tracking Risk?
Examining the Fix Our Forests Act

Catastrophic wildfires are now a recurring headline across much of the western United States—millions of acres burned, lives disrupted or lost, and communities and livelihoods destroyed. Public concern is both justified and urgent, and people are increasingly looking to government leaders for meaningful action.

In response, policymakers have advanced the Fix Our Forests Act, which is moving through Congress with bipartisan support, but the Act may not achieve its stated wildfire risk reduction goals.

While the Act contains several components, its core approach prioritizes faster and more expansive forest fuels treatments such as mechanical thinning and prescribed fire by rolling back long-standing environmental safeguards that have guided federal land management for decades. The legislation also significantly curtails public and Tribal oversight and sharply limits judicial review, compressing the window for legal challenges from six years to just 150 days. Without adequate time to challenge implementation, how can accountability be maintained?

Although the Act contains provisions that are broadly supported by the environmental community, such as increased support for wildland firefighters and their families in cases of serious injury or death, it has also created significant divisions within the conservation community. Concerns about weakened environmental protections and reduced public participation are well founded; however, more fundamentally, there are legitimate scientific questions about whether the forest management activities promoted by the Act will achieve their intended outcomes.

When fuel treatments are carefully designed and matched to forest type, they can enhance ecological resilience and reduce wildfire risk. However, applying inappropriate treatments in unsuitable ecosystems (such as chaparral) can produce the opposite outcome. Concerns also remain about provisions allowing treatment of very large areas (up to 10,000 acres) without full environmental safeguards. If treatments are poorly sited or insufficiently tailored, they may simplify forest structure by reducing structural complexity and canopy cover, resulting in drier surface fuels and increased oxygen availability that can intensify fire behavior following ignition. In addition, the expanded access needed to implement and maintain large-scale treatments often requires temporary or permanent road construction, a well-established driver of human-caused wildfire ignitions. Together, these risks highlight the importance of careful siting, scale-appropriate implementation, and integration of fuel treatments within a broader, science-based fire management framework.

The Fix Our Forests Act represents a predictable response to an escalating wildfire crisis, but despite its intent, it poses significant risks to both forest ecosystems and the communities it seeks to protect. Assuming the Act passes, what happens if treatments fail or increase risk? What safeguards exist to course-correct? The Fix Our Forest Act is a high-stakes experiment with reduced safeguards and severely limited mechanisms for correction. It would be prudent to require meaningful monitoring and enforceable triggers to make the necessary revisions.

New Data Basin Gateway Launched

The latest Data Basin Gateway, the Alaska Seascapes Knowledge (ASK) Portal, launched last week. In partnership with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and Nuka Research, the focus of the gateway is to provide a collaborative, online platform to contribute and organize geospatial information pertaining to Cook Inlet and the Kodiak region of the state. The integration of the rich existing and growing datasets and supporting documentation empowers users to make better decisions for ecological sustainability of these valuable marine and coastal environments.

Different Trees, Same Rules: What Shapes Tropical Forest Diversity Worldwide

Tropical regions differ a lot in how many kinds of trees they have overall. The tropical Americas, for example, have many more tree species than Africa or Southeast Asia. So 115 researchers from around the tropics wanted to know whether these big differences also show up at smaller, local scales and whether the same kinds of environmental conditions shape tree diversity in all tropical regions, even though they contain very different tree species.

To test this, researchers used data from 429 one-hectare forest plots across the tropics and combined it with information on climate, soils, and terrain. Using a machine-learning model, they predicted how many tree species occur in each plot. Together, environmental factors explained about 86% of the differences in tree diversity from place to place.

Even though tropical regions have very different evolutionary histories and species, the way local tree diversity responds to environmental conditions is remarkably similar across continents. This suggests that the same basic environmental factors shape how many tree species can coexist in a place, no matter which species are present.

These results point to a strong and widespread role for environmental “niches” in determining local tree diversity across the tropics and they raise an important challenge for ecologists to explain why these patterns are so consistent worldwide.

Endangered Species Act in Jeopardy – Again

Protecting the nation’s endangered species has been a national priority for more than a century, beginning with the passage of the Lacey Act in 1900. The Act strengthened state efforts to protect wildlife by making it illegal to transport unlawfully taken animals across state lines. In the decades that followed, Congress passed a series of laws to extend protections to the country’s most imperiled species. These efforts often focused on individual species—such as the brown pelican, bald eagle, and whooping crane—or on entire taxonomic groups, including birds, fishes, sea turtles, and marine mammals.

In 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) into law with overwhelming public and bipartisan support. The ESA replaced earlier endangered species laws and established the most comprehensive framework for wildlife protection in U.S. history.

The ESA prohibits the “take” of endangered species by any person, including individuals, corporations, and government entities. “Take” is broadly defined to include actions that harm species, such as significant habitat modification or degradation—a definition that has been central to protecting essential habitat and supporting species recovery. In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this interpretation. Today, the ESA protects 1,662 U.S. species and 638 foreign species, and public support remains high at 84 percent.

Since the Reagan administration, the ESA has faced persistent challenges from corporate interests that see its regulations as obstacles to development. These efforts have led to regulatory rollbacks, chronic underfunding, and legislative maneuvers, including delays in listing species, blocks on new listings, and loopholes undermining protections.

Most recently, the Trump administration proposed sweeping changes that would weaken the law’s effectiveness. These revisions prioritize corporate profits over species survival, restrict critical habitat designations, and make it harder to list new species despite an existing backlog. Agencies would also face new procedural hurdles that could remove essential recovery tools, limit habitat offsets, and redefine environmental “baseline” conditions—even though such baselines naturally change over time.

Despite these challenges, the ESA’s success is well documented. The recoveries of species such as the bald eagle, American alligator, grizzly bear, gray wolf, and many others would not have been possible without the protections provided by the Endangered Species Act.

For a complete ESA history, check out https://www.fws.gov/esa50/our-history/pre-1973

To follow the story and take action, check out https://www.endangered.org/take-action/

Spotlight on Species Recovery: The West’s Vanishing Porcupines

New Research Article from CBI’s Dr. Alexandra D. Syphard

CBI’s senior research scientist, Dr. Alexandra D. Syphard, recently published a new research article titled, Causal analysis of fire regime drivers in California. In this work, Dr. Syphard explores the complex challenges facing wildlife and ecosystems in landscapes experiencing rapid environmental change. Her research emphasizes how human activities, such as land development and resource management, intersect with natural processes to influence species distributions and habitat quality.

The study provides valuable insights for conservation planning, offering strategies to prioritize habitat protection, mitigate human impacts, and support species recovery. By combining advanced modeling techniques with real-world data, Dr. Syphard’s work helps inform decisions that balance ecological resilience with the realities of land use.

This publication underscores CBI’s ongoing commitment to advancing science-based approaches to conservation and highlights Dr. Syphard’s leadership in addressing some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time.