Trying Times: Keeping the Faith as Environmental Gains Are Lost

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shield pesticide makers, even though the major paper that in 2000 found the herbicide safe despite its links to cancer was retracted in February because Monsanto appears to have had a hidden hand in the study.

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.