TLDR: The current administration is openly hostile to understanding environmental change. It has broadly targeted scientists and journalists. The only alternative seems to be a radical transparency. This essay is ultimately geared towards the people I’d like to interview. It’s kind of like a methods section, written for anyone who needs to know my bias, or how I’m treating this moment.
“I have no idea how to do my job right now.”
This is how I introduced myself as I wandered around the 14th National Water Quality Monitoring conference in March in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As a science writer I figured a scientific gathering might focus my mind after the shocking first barrage of Trump’s war on empathy, science, and the Constitution.
METHODS SECTION
This meeting of expert water watchers happens every two years, and it seemed like a reasonable opportunity to check broadly on the waters of the United States. Clean water for drinking, commerce, recreation, and nature is an obviously universal and invaluable resource. Would the DOGE crew and the looming kakistocracy actually piss in our water?
A few months later that query seems beyond naïve, but it didn’t even survive contact with Green Bay. During the conference the Environmental Protection Agency officially announced massive regulatory rollbacks, eliminated the environmental justice office, and slashed $20 billion worth of climate related grants. (Legal challenges have temporarily unblocked some funding, but the administration’s intent is clear.) Court documents revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking at Habitat for Humanity for pursuing federal climate grants. On the final day news broke that a French scientist had earlier been denied entry to the United States to attend an earlier scientific conference. Border agents examining his phone found criticism of what’s now widely called the ‘Apocalypse of American Science.’
You may know some or all of this. More likely you have your own crazy tale—part fury and part freakout—from whatever part of the functioning adult world you inhabit. That is one frightening reality of this moment: so much damage is being done that the professionals can’t even keep track of their own spheres of interest. We’ll be comparing notes for years in the fight against truth decay.
The only alternative seems to be a radical transparency. This placeholder edition of The Lemonadist isn’t probably going to interest casual readers the way I hope my other writing does. It’s a reflection on where journalism is and might be going and how in the world we can get it to focus on saving enough of the planet that our children’s children might thank us.
This essay is ultimately geared towards the people I’d like to interview. It’s kind of like a methods section, written for anyone who needs to know my bias, or how I’m treating this moment.
The National Water Quality Monitoring council was created in 1997 and is now managed by the Environmental Protection Agency. It helps the monitoring community “through collaboration and information exchange.” This year’s sponsors included USGS, NOAA, and the EPA, but almost no one with a federal paycheck made it to Green Bay. Three weeks before the event EPA cuts of 65% were forecast, and travel by federal employees was curtailed by the White House. Some 300 in-person attendees canceled their trips. Organizers reshuffled the entire agenda to salvage the program.
We all want clean water, but as a construct of law it’s been riding a slow legal see-saw since enactment of the 1972 Clean Water Act. But this isn’t even a meeting about making or enforcing those environmental rules. These are mostly public sector employees, often working with environmental non-profits and citizen scientist volunteers. They make sure that the water we drink and play on meets our quality standards.
“Water is the great equalizer,” said one scientist in Green Bay. “Everybody needs good clean water. Clean water affects so many things we do: industry, agriculture, recreation, health. It’s the aesthetics, the beauty of the world, the things that we enjoy doing.”
Never in my life would that have been a controversial quote, but I won’t be naming this senior scientist—or anybody else I spoke to on this reporting trip. How do you do journalism as you’ve been practicing for nearly 40 years when your sources may wind up being punished for sharing ideas and information? How do you do journalism when the government is openly hostile to free and fair dialogue?
On March 14th, in a vitriolic speech at the Department of Justice, Trump attacked CNN and MSNBC, calling their work “illegal.” He punished the AP for not adopting his re-naming of the Gulf of Mexico, then kicked ALL of the wire services out rather than re-admit the AP as ordered by the court. His FCC is broadly threatening broadcast licenses and particularly targeting NPR and PBS. Lie detector tests have been used at multiple agencies to find leakers, and the Justice Department has cleared the way to go after journalist records. Bill Owens, the long-time executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned over loss of editorial independence.
Everyone in the U.S. should be worried that the flagship of investigative television journalism has voluntarily clipped its wings. We should be worried that Rümeysa Öztürk spent more than 6 weeks in ICE detention for signing an op-ed. A climate of fear is anathema to meaningful democratic discourse. It’s an intentional barrier to much-need planetary work.
FIGHT TRUTH DECAY!
Journalism in distress is not, alone, a Trump thing. The industry has been teetering for two decades on a knife’s edge of technological transformation and economic collapse. We’ve lost a third of our newspapers in 20 years and a half-million jobs overall in publishing since 1990. Some of this loss is self inflicted, a rolling failure to adapt. Some is the result of predatory capitalism. Some comes from shifting norms around disinformation—the audacity of political liars and the alternative realities they generate.
So yes, woe is journalism. But also, woe is you, me, and our whole neighborhood. News deserts and siloed media are real. We’re now experiencing the dire social, economic, and political consequences.
My first discrete media memory is watching the moon landing. My second is being called in from the sandbox to watch the resignation of Richard Nixon. A newspaper did that, and I became a huge consumer of news in my teens.
I started learning journalism in college. That tracked quickly towards activism, but I returned to journalism after graduation. My early training was freelance reporting for an alt weekly and opinion editing at a left-leaning monthly. By definition, the journalism skewed progressive.
Eventually my science brain took the wheel and I drifted into cancer writing and focused more on ecological sciences. 2006 tested me. With two young children and a wife recovering from a withering year of cancer treatment I was unable to pursue the national magazine assignments that paid bills. A ghostwriting opportunity arose—An Inconvenient Truth had entranced Sundance, and now they were scrambling to have a companion volume in stores for the cinematic debut. Could I spend a few weeks writing some supplemental pages? Could I help ghost Al Gore?
My business decision here began with a personal ethics probe: If I took the work, I was registering a climate ‘bias.’ I could not in good faith now write a ‘both sides’ story involving climate.
That was fine with me. As a political observer, I knew how the denial game was funded. As a science journalist I was—and remain—absolutely convinced by the overwhelming scientific consensus around our understanding of climate change. I was more interested in reporting on the future than litigating a lie.
The family medical crisis lingered. I used my journalism skills to profile scientists at work, usually for alumni magazines. This looks and reads a lot like journalism, but it is also still a form of public relations for higher education. This distinction mattered on a professional level—while I consider myself an environmental journalist, I couldn’t join the Society for Environmental Journalists because of my alumni magazine work.
Now I’m returning to journalism, exploring the fringes of this weird and novel newsletter niche to end my career. The crazy thing is, while newsletters have filled an important void for both producers and consumers of news, one of my smarter friends recently asked me to explain what they were. His confusion showed me how even a shared understanding of the role of media has fractured.
Given this state of affairs, what are my biases?
I lean left, but what does that even mean? The MAGA playbook likes to label most everyone else Marxist and Communist, but you know that’s ridiculous. They’ve shattered so many Overton windows you’ll lay open a vein trying to decipher left and right. Unfortunately that hasn’t stopped even mainstream media from adopting this divisive framing.
I believe in universal health care, taxing the rich, campaign finance reform, fair voting maps, equal rights, feeding children. I know that diversity makes most systems stronger. I believe in the separation of church and state. Trans rights are human rights. I believe in due process before the law.
I’m not skittish about pronouns, women in power, critical race theory, or land acknowledgements, and also see them as mere tokens on the scales of justice. Humans make lots of terrifying errors and we’re better for talking about them and trying to learn from them.
I’m distressed that we’re lining up with Putin, Bukele, and the almighty petro dollar. I’m utterly perplexed by picking fights with Canada, Denmark, and penguins. I believe the world is better when governments cooperate to solve mutual problems. Science has been both a template for this cooperation and a major beneficiary.
Here are some contradictions to my “liberal agenda:” I have a healthy respect for the power of markets and a weak spot for the idea of regulated capitalism. I expend almost no political thought on gun laws. I abhor the flags of hate and aggression being unfurled in Washington, but I’m a free speech absolutist. Even when MAGA/fascist talking points make my head explode.
Because my work assumes a functioning civil society and a healthy culture of inquiry, I’ve promoted and participated in protests against this administration. I will continue to do so.
How does this bias play out in my work? Two years ago I wrote in-depth about the years long legal efforts by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to challenge the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline running across tribal land in northern Wisconsin. It was such a complex story, and the treaty rights element so intricate and unfamiliar to most readers, that I ultimately made the decision to NOT talk to Enbridge. My justification: Line 5 can carry 540,000 barrels a day. At this moment, that’s worth about $32 million. A day. That kind of money has the power to create its own reality, and I wanted to listen to other voices. This decision was explained to the readers.
That’s an approach I’m likely to continue moving forward: Push back, and let my readers know why.
As I try to figure out how to continue my own work, I’m not going to prioritize the voice of, say, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Even before his confirmation to this office, Vought was lashing out at what he called “climate extremism.” He’s engineered the widespread firing of scientists and field workers who care for our public lands. Funding for climate research has been slashed while non-profits have lost grants and have been warned against aggressive advocacy.
But a full 60% of the American public is either concerned or alarmed by climate change, a number that has continued to rise over the last decade even as other political currents have flowed elsewhere. Only 10% of Americans share Vought’s perspective. He calls our common sense concern “extremist.”
These numbers get even more definitive when you ask people who spend time closely observing the natural world and the profoundly shifting rhythms of our warming planet. The most important consensus here is the scientific consensus around climate change. Among hunters and anglers 1 in 5 believe climate change is already affecting their sport, while half expect future impacts. As recently as 2019 “89% of Americans from across the political spectrum support extending clean energy tax credits for solar, wind and energy storage.”
That’s a useful number, 89, in light of a global journalism project based on an emerging consensus in public opinion research. It shows that an “overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89% … want their governments to take stronger climate action.”
At a recent paddling trade show in Madison, Wisconsin the local chapter of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby offered a pin board allowing visitors to rate their own level of concern:
In the America that I know catastrophic environmental change is unfolding already. From North Carolina to Los Angeles to Tornado Alley and the Ohio River Valley the evidence that climate change is accelerating is credible and visible to all who care to look.
Climate projections are difficult to face, and can be downright scary. Have we actually reached that point in the horror film where we gouge out our own eyes?
Closing labs and observatories and degrading data collection is the real nightmare on Main Street. Over the last 50 years we’ve built incredibly extensive networks of environmental sensors and cultivated deep banks of knowledge. Farmers know we need this information, yet they had to sue this administration to keep climate data from going dark. Why end our 45 year effort of tracking of major storm costs? Why blind our economists to emerging realities?
This isn’t me shouting fire—we already know this crowded theater is burning. This is me shouting that they have sabotaged the sprinkler and alarm systems and are now trying to lock us inside.
WATER IS LIFE
This was the kind of subversive science on display at the National Water Quality Monitoring conference:
Green Bay’s regional wastewater utility working to heal its distressed watersheds. (Depending on who’s doing the counting it’s the largest fresh water estuary on the planet— the sport fishery alone feeds more than a quarter billion dollars into the local economy.)
50 years of groundwater monitoring in the central sands region of Wisconsin continues to evolve in service of research and production in the nation’s third most important potato growing state. (Total state crop value was $415 million in 2022.)
How a small town used monitoring science to ensure enough clean water for both its residents and its very thirsty and most important employer.
Environmental scientists—and environmental writers—mostly want to geek out on problems like this. Many could make more money in the private sector, but were called to public service by curiosity and sense of purpose. As a society, we benefit tremendously from the working marriage of science and tech. Our entire industrial economy has been built upon an uncountable myriad of these obsessions and inquiries. The return on investment is literally our entire modern world.
Over three days in Green Bay no one I spoke to tried to defend or comprehend what’s happening in Washington. “It’s driving us crazy,” said one of the uncertainty. “It gets crazier every day,” said another.
One scientist I spoke with had been told by superiors to scrub their presentation of any of the many words that now trigger federal scrutiny.
Another scientist was just finishing graduate school. For years they dreamed about being a staff scientist with the EPA. They fed the dream with a plan, put in the work, and got the grades. They were weeks from their advanced degree. Instead of ebullient, they were now dazed. Their dream was dead.
We won’t know the full measure of this disaster for years and probably decades. But one senior scientist noted that DOGE and related cuts have nothing to do with efficiency, because the community built at these conferences promoted better science and a higher return on public investment. “My efficiency as a scientist increased because my community increased,” they said. “This chaos that has been created is not increasing efficiency at all. As a matter of fact, I think we’re creating a much more inefficient system. What I don’t get is the people who are actively doing it. They know better. In their own business they wouldn’t do this. It doesn’t make any sense.”
MAY THE FOREST BE WITH YOU
Plot twist: Just two weeks after this meeting, more than 1000 MAGA faithful gathered in these very Green Bay rooms for a hype fest to see which MAGA cheerleader would receive $1 million payments from Elon Musk. Two days later Wisconsin decisively repudiated the Musk/Trump agenda at the polls.
The assaults continue. The resistance grows.
The Bethesda Declaration, where more than 300 US National Institutes of Health (NIH) employees have urged their Trump appointee director Dr Jay Bhattacharya and Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. to “restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons.” They also seek staff reinstatements, renewed global collaboration, and the freedom to submit to peer-reviewed journals.
EPA employees have followed suit, with more than 170 EPA employees signing openly a declaration of dissent, with another 100 expressing anonymous support. Those numbers are growing, but many were also just placed on administrative leave.
I’m with these civil servants of conscience. I’m deeply opposed to this administration’s assault on science, academia, government workers, and civil society. Environmental scientists and park rangers are among nature’s first responders, and I’m with them.
Of course I’m biassed—in my work and in my personal life these are my people, my friends, my neighbors, my classmates, my co-workers. We trade tips at trailheads and boat launches. I believe that the work that they do and the conversations that they’re having about how to manage our ecosystems and watersheds, our forests and fisheries, are some of the most important dialogues happening on the planet today.
It makes no economic or ethical or even nationalistic sense to intentionally erode this nation’s massive advantage in scientific competence. The MAGA vandalism here is recklessly short-sighted and treacherously self-centered. It’s about creating chaos to facilitate authoritarian rule. The longer this mistake is allowed to stand, the farther and deeper we will collectively fall. And we were falling fast even before this fatal turn in fortune.
I’m not the fastest writer, and it’s a difficult news environment for the kind of stories I want to tell. I definitely needed some time to think about these suddenly personal questions. But now I’m behind. We’re all behind.
My goal here has always been to build up a series of stories about environmental change. I think I can still do that. The planet doesn’t care what Russel Vought thinks, and neither do I. And so there’s really nothing to do but to get on with it.
