SOS

Save our Scientists (and their work)

Another week has passed and there’s no letting up in the new administration’s torrent of executive actions. Long running strategic initiatives are being stymied, agencies shuttered, funding eliminated, website content stricken, and organizations of all stripes bullied. (I mean, the Kennedy Center, really?!)

As we wrote last week, it’s one thing to review, finetune, or even restructure existing efforts—indeed, that’s usually a smart practice. But this is something entirely different. This is not seeking to examine what is working and making changes to what is not. This is reckless and destructive.

Among the many casualties recently left in the administration’s wake is a near-complete project by a group of leading scientists—some of whom were employed by the government, some not—examining society’s dependence on nature. This group of experts had substantially completed their research and were finalizing a comprehensive paper reporting their findings. Given the resources that went into this, the obvious and huge importance of the topic, and the status of near completion, it seems crazy to block publication at the very last minute. Kind of Orwellian even.

This one hits close to home for me. When I ran TNC, we made it a priority to help people understand just how much we all depend on so-called “green infrastructure.” Consider man-made, or “gray” infrastructure, for example. People find it easy to recognize how vital it is to take good care of assets like bridges and tunnels. The same should be true for green infrastructure. We depend just as much—and probably much more—on nature.

To be sure, many of us want to protect nature just for nature’s sake. And we also want to do everything we can to ensure that our children and grandchildren will be able to experience nature like we do today. But, in addition to these important motivations, it’s also the case that we should protect nature because it is a vital asset that does so much for us.

Green infrastructure includes farmland that delivers healthy food, ecosystems that provide protection from storms, forests that store and clean water, mangroves and grasslands that remove carbon from the atmosphere, habitat that supports biodiversity, and so on. That’s equally worthy of protection and investment.

By the way, I happened to write a book about this a few years back: Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature. Please check it out if this topic interests you, and let me know what you think.

A big reason I put so much emphasis on investing in nature to protect its economic value was because the team and I thought it would be a smart way to attract bipartisan support. We thought: What a great way to find supporters on both sides of the political aisle for our cause. And we were right. It worked very well for us. Alas, that now feels like a bygone and almost innocent era.

Today not much is exempt from politicization and polarization. It’s as if our leaders haven’t heard the old adage of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

But I know our readers are pragmatic as well as passionate about finding solutions. Many of you are highly engaged supporters of science-based and non-partisan approaches to protecting nature. Here’s a chance to do more. Please speak up and demand that this report gets published. Or, if you prefer (here I’m thinking of our readers who are donors or who work in the philanthropy area), please provide the funding to get this report published independently. Let’s help these scientists get this critical work peer-reviewed, widely shared, and acted on.

We’re all looking for ways to get off the sidelines and into the game right now, right? Well…here’s your chance.

Onward,