Vanessa Castle and Matt Beirne from the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe head up the Elwha River to a fishing hole.
Bellamy Pailthorp / KNKX
On Earth Day in 2022, President Biden spoke in Seattle, announcing an executive order that created the first-ever national assessment of nature. Two and a half years later, President Trump rescinded the effort on his first day in office.
But the team that had started the work — led by a professor at the University of Washington — refused to give it up.
Now, an 868-hundred page draft of the assessment is out for public comment, with plans for publication by the end of this year.
Biden’s remarks in Seattle’s Seward Park highlighted his administration’s climate agenda before he signed the order. He chose the park for its old-growth forests that served as a backdrop for his pledge to map, catalog and conserve old-growth trees in national forests, garnering spontaneous applause and extensive media coverage.
But Biden also spoke more broadly about the benefits of nature.
“Scientists estimate that the protection and restoration of our natural lands and waters can provide more than a third of the solution to climate change,” Biden said, pointing to the simplicity of preservation as a climate solution, even “if we did nothing else.”
Started in Seattle
Tucked into the order was a short clause that garnered far less attention that day. It stated that new research would include “an assessment of the condition of nature.”
About a year after the announcement, Phil Levin was appointed by the Biden administration to direct the National Nature Assessment.
“It was the first time that there was going to be a holistic assessment of the condition of nature in the U.S.: our lands, our waters, our wildlife, and all the benefits that nature provides to people,” Levin said. “From jobs and livelihoods to health and well-being, to safety from natural hazards and even to our cultural heritage.”
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Levin is a professor of environmental sciences and the interim director of UW’s EarthLab, which promotes climate action and equity. He has also worked as lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Washington and on the federal Integrated Ecosystem Assessment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Levin said expanding the assessment work from marine environments to the entire country presented a rare opportunity.
His initial team produced an annotated outline of the assessment, which made it into the Federal Register. They were almost done with the first draft when Trump canceled the effort. Levin said he had no doubt that he would find a way to continue.
“I believe this work is really important for our country. So, OK, the government isn’t going to support it anymore. It doesn’t mean that the work’s not needed,” he said. “And so we just kept going.”
Canceled but not quitting
The original authors were volunteers. About a quarter of them were federal employees and unable to continue after Trump’s cancellation. So Levin had to rebuild the team and raise about $3 million to pay for staff, administrative costs and the planned technical review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
But Levin never doubted that the assessment was needed. That hunch was validated when he saw the team’s preliminary findings about the state of nature today.
Half of wetlands have been lost since the 1780s. “Half the country is used for agriculture. A million acres of land every year are converted to development across the U.S., and there are 90,000 dams in rivers across the U.S. that are disrupting fish migrations,” Levin said. “At the same time, there’s a lot of hope and optimism. There’s a lot of bright spots out there.”
Related: As U.S. abandons climate fight, Washington state feels the heat to do more
Local examples include the successful dam removal and restoration of the Elwha River and the rebuilding of West Coast fisheries that were nearly wiped out. He also noted the recent recognition of Indigenous stewardship and the need to plant trees and re-green our cities as reasons for optimism.
Out for comment
Levin formed a nonprofit and rebranded the National Nature Assessment as a national initiative, called The Nature Record, with 171 authors on the team. Their third draft is now out for scientific review. They plan to have six drafts altogether.
Levin said one of the first things he had to do as director was define the scope of the work in the assessment. Within that, his team worked to come up with an answer to the question: “What is nature?”
“Some people think nature is far away…over there,” separate from people, he said. “Other people say, ‘We are part of nature. Nature is everywhere….nature is in your backyard, nature is in a vacant lot.’”
Levin’s team worked to reconcile these very different worldviews.
“Our definition of nature really focuses on the living aspects of nature and the nonliving parts of nature that affect life,” he said. “So we don’t talk about, necessarily, water by itself. But we talk about how water impacts plants and animals and other forms of life, and we made it a real intentional decision to say that people are part of nature. People are not separate from nature.”
Levin and his team are also touring the country with this draft, making presentations and asking for public comment.
“Whether you’re a technical expert or just an interested person, we are wanting to hear from everyone,” Levin said.
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He said they have recently started working with partners in the arts community, sponsoring a contest for young artists, asking them to respond to prompts based on the findings in The Nature Record. There is an anthology of poetry that is a companion to the assessment; one of the featured poems is by Washington state poet laureate, Derek Sheffield. Levin said these contributions are great compliments to the science in the assessment.
“We all have something to contribute to this record,” he said. “Scientists can contribute in one way. We all see things that are changing. We all see hope, I think. And so these artists are engaging and creating the record through their own skills and lens.”
The Nature Record’s public presentations in the coming weeks include venues in North Dakota, upstate New York and Southern California. There is also a virtual event on April 29.
Comments are open until May 30. After they are processed, the first edition e-book of The Nature Record will be available for download. MIT Press is also publishing it as a paperback book for sale.
Bellamy Pailthorp is a reporter with KNKX. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.
