Beyond Defense
Why the Conservation Movement Must Begin Building What Comes Next
The past few weeks have been among the most consequential for American conservation in decades.
The Trump administration has weakened the Endangered Species Act, dramatically reduced the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments, dissolved the Bears Ears Intertribal Commission, and is now seeking to reopen the ten-mile protective buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park to oil, gas, and mineral development.
Taken individually, each decision is alarming.
Taken together, they represent one of the most coordinated assaults on American conservation in modern history.
Conservationists should be angry.
We should challenge these actions in court. We should support the organizations defending our public lands and wildlife. We should organize politically. We should vote. We should do everything possible to protect the extraordinary conservation legacy built by previous generations.
But we should also recognize what this moment has revealed.
Not simply about this administration.
About ourselves.
The Conservation We Built
For more than a century, the conservation movement has never been given its victories.
It has fought for them.
Every major advance in American conservation—from the establishment of our national parks to the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, collaborative conservation, and landscape-scale stewardship—was achieved because people organized. Scientists, Tribal nations, conservation organizations, local communities, hunters and anglers, faith leaders, businesses, landowners, public servants, and millions of ordinary citizens built a movement capable of changing the nation's priorities.
Conservation was never inevitable.
It was built.
Along the way, leaders from both political parties contributed to that legacy. Republican leadership helped establish the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the era that gave rise to the first Earth Day. Democratic administrations expanded protected lands, elevated climate change as a defining conservation challenge, invested in collaborative and landscape-scale conservation, and helped launch initiatives such as the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives.
Those achievements were never gifts from government.
They were victories won by a movement strong enough to make conservation politically possible.
That history matters.
Because the lesson of the past few weeks is not that organizing has failed.
It is that the next phase of organizing must look different from the last.
Beyond Defense
For generations, the conservation movement organized primarily to persuade governments to conserve nature.
Today, government is increasingly demonstrating that it can also dismantle conservation.
That changes the strategic landscape.
Strong environmental laws matter.
Public lands matter.
Elections matter.
But they cannot be the conservation movement's only strategy.
In hindsight, perhaps it should not surprise us that one of the Trump administration's earliest conservation actions in 2017 was eliminating funding for the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). The LCCs were not perfect, but they represented something profoundly important: a growing national network bringing together federal agencies, Tribal nations, states, scientists, conservation organizations, and local partners to conserve landscapes rather than isolated jurisdictions.
That network was deliberately dismantled before it had the opportunity to mature into a durable, nationwide collaborative conservation movement.
Nearly a decade later, we are witnessing the consequences.
Faced with a coordinated effort to dismantle conservation protections, the movement has mobilized through lawsuits, advocacy campaigns, scientific organizations, public comments, and political action. These are proven strategies, developed and refined during an era when government institutions, despite their imperfections and political swings, generally remained the primary arena through which conservation victories could be achieved and defended.
Those strategies remain indispensable.
But they are largely defensive strategies.
They defend laws already written.
They defend lands already protected.
They defend institutions built by previous generations.
What they do not yet provide is a shared strategy for building the next generation of conservation.
That is now our responsibility.
Building What Comes Next
The conservation movement has reached another turning point in its history.
The twentieth century taught us how to build a movement capable of winning environmental laws, protected landscapes, and collaborative conservation.
The twenty-first century must teach us how to build a movement capable of stewarding those achievements through democratic institutions rooted in the landscapes themselves.
Movements create change. Institutions make change endure.
That is why the next chapter of conservation cannot simply be about defending yesterday's victories.
It must also be about building tomorrow's institutions.
In my forthcoming book, Designing Nature's Half, I explore one possible expression of that idea through ecoregional cooperatives—democratic, place-based institutions designed to bring Tribal nations, communities, landowners, scientists, conservation organizations, businesses, and public agencies together to steward the landscapes they share over the long term.
Whether ecoregional cooperatives ultimately prove to be the right model everywhere is less important than the principle they represent.
The conservation movement must become as innovative institutionally as it has become scientifically.
Imagine a conservation movement that not only defends landscapes, but designs and helps govern them.
Imagine institutions designed around watersheds, ecoregions, wildlife corridors, and working landscapes instead of political jurisdictions.
Imagine communities sharing responsibility for the places they call home—not only during moments of crisis, but across generations.
Imagine conservation becoming something people build together, not simply something they ask governments to provide.
This moment demands more than resistance.
It demands vision.
It demands innovation.
It demands solidarity.
It demands collective action.
It demands that we begin building the institutions the future now requires.
The status quo is over.
The conservation movement cannot simply wait for political conditions to improve.
It must become something larger than the political moment in which it finds itself.
Every generation of conservationists has been called to build what their time required.
This is our moment.
The next century of conservation will not be defined only by what we defend.
It will be defined by what we have the courage to build together.
