Parton asked them to withdraw it. She said she was honored, and then said that given everything going on in the world, she did not think putting her “on a pedestal” was appropriate right then (CBS News 2021). She left the door open for later, maybe after she was gone, if people still felt that way.

She died this morning in Nashville, at eighty (NBC News 2026). So the door is open now. But I keep thinking about the refusal rather than the statue, because the refusal is the part that teaches something.

What she was actually doing

The obituaries lead with the music, as they should. Twenty-five number one country singles. A songbook that other people’s careers were built on. But the work she said she wanted to be remembered for was a book program in Sevier County, Tennessee.

Her father could not read or write. In 1995 she started mailing free books, one a month, to children from birth until they started school, beginning in the county where she grew up. By 2022 the Imagination Library had mailed 186 million books and had spread across several countries (Axios 2022). She once said that when they lay her down, she would be thinking of the Imagination Library (Axios 2022).

Look at what that program actually is. It is a mailing list. Address verification, county sponsors, publisher negotiations, postage, and thirty years of not stopping. There is no pilot phase and no theory of change. A book shows up in a mailbox with a child’s name on it. Then another one the next month, for five years.

That is deeply unfashionable work. It does not make for a compelling annual report. It is also, by any measure I know how to apply, one of the most successful pieces of private philanthropy in modern American life.

What paid for the generosity

Here is the part that funders should sit with. Early in her career, Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You.” Colonel Tom Parker’s condition was that Parton hand over half the publishing. She refused, and by her own account cried over it. Two decades later Whitney Houston recorded the song, it became one of the best selling singles in history, and Parton owned it.

She told that story as a business lesson, and it is one. It is also the reason the rest of this essay exists. The Imagination Library, the theme park that employs thousands of her neighbors, the million dollars she quietly put into Vanderbilt in April 2020 that turned up in Moderna’s donor list that November (CBS News 2021), all of it was paid for by a woman who kept her own publishing rights when the most powerful manager in music told her to give them up.

Giving at that scale requires owning something first. The people who give the most are often the ones who were most stubborn about what they refused to hand over. That is not a comfortable thing to say in a field that prefers to talk about generosity as pure self-emptying. But it is true, and she is the clearest example of it I can think of.

Truth to power, in her own key

She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice (Forbes 2021). She asked her home state to shelve her statue. She quietly took “Dixie” out of the name of her dinner show. When asked about the protests of 2020 she said, plainly, that Black lives matter, in a genre and to an audience where that was not a free sentence to say.

None of it came out as confrontation. This is where people who admired her and people who wanted more from her have always disagreed, and the disagreement should not be smoothed over on the day she dies. Serious people wanted her to be more explicit, to endorse, to name names, and felt her refusal was avoidance dressed up as grace. That criticism is not unfair. She chose to keep the whole country listening rather than win any particular argument, and that choice cost something.

What I would say for her is that she never used the ambiguity as a reason to sit still. The positions turned up in what she did with her money long before they turned up in anything she said. She paid full tuition for her employees. She sent cash with no conditions attached to families who lost their homes in the Gatlinburg fires. She built her literacy program in counties with some of the deepest poverty in the country and sent the books to every child, so that no family had to prove hardship to qualify. You can argue with her rhetoric. It is harder to argue with where the money went.

Five things worth taking

Give where you are from, and stay there. She started in one county and never left it behind, even as the program went global. Knowing a place well is usually what makes the giving work.

Trust people with cash. Direct payments, no conditions, no reporting requirements, no case management. The evidence caught up with her about twenty years later.

Keep your rights. The refusal that looked like stubbornness in 1974 paid for everything that came after.

Decline the pedestal. Not out of false modesty, but because accepting honors is how institutions turn your independence into their endorsement. A person who has not taken the medal is harder to co-opt.

Build for thirty years (or more), not for the grant cycle. The book arrives every month. That is her whole model. It’s boring, repetitive, verifiable, and the reason a generation of children in Appalachia associates their own name with something arriving in the mail for them that feeds their curiosity, fosters understanding, and builds a foundation of knowledge and learning.

On days like this the temptation is to reach for the word icon and leave it there. Better to be precise. She was a talented woman who mailed books to children whose families were stuck in poverty, every month for thirty years. She kept her own copyrights. She turned down a statue and two medals. And she managed to be loved by an entire country without ever pretending to be neutral about whether people deserved to be treated well.

Somewhere down the road, Tennessee will get around to the statue. She said she thought that would be fine, once she was gone. Statue or no, her work and her legacy will always be a light (of a clear blue morning).

Sources

Axios Columbus. 2022. “Dolly Parton celebrates her Imagination Library program.” August 10, 2022.

CBS News. 2021. “Dolly Parton rejects proposed statue of her at Tennessee Capitol.” February 19, 2021.

Forbes. 2021. “Dolly Parton Declines Proposal To Build A Statue Of Her On The Tennessee Capitol Grounds.” February 18, 2021.

NBC News. 2026. “Dolly Parton, country music icon, dies at 80.” August 25, 2026.

The Music Universe. 2026. “Dolly Parton dies at 80.” August 25, 2026.

Here it is: $16.5 million. That is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's own estimate for the total cost of recovering the rusty patched bumble bee across its entire range, the full set of actions needed to take a federally endangered species off the list (USFWS 2021). Believe it or not, that is the cost of a single house in Aspen, and it would recover the first bumble bee ever listed under the Endangered Species Act (82 FR 3186, 2017).

Almost nobody is funding it. I'd like to change that, and I think Virginia is the place to do it.

Why this bee, and why Virginia

The rusty patched bumble bee was once one of the most common bumble bees in the eastern United States, familiar enough that nobody bothered to count them. Then, starting in the late 1990s, it collapsed. It has disappeared from nearly ninety percent of its historic range (NRDC 2026). The best available science points to a brutal interaction between an introduced pathogen and pesticide exposure, with habitat loss and climate change grinding away underneath (USFWS 2021). It was listed as endangered in 2017.

Most of what's left survives in the upper Midwest. But there is one other place: the Allegheny Highlands, where Virginia meets West Virginia. In Virginia, the bee has been found in recent years in just four counties, Bath, Highland, Augusta and Rockingham. In 2020, state biologists documented ten of them on the Highland Wildlife Management Area, which made it the strongest known site in the Commonwealth (Virginia DWR 2025). Ten bees was a headline!

Here is why those ten bees matter far beyond Virginia. Rangewide genetic analysis shows that the Virginia and West Virginia population is a distinct cluster, substantially differentiated from everything remaining in the Midwest (91 FR 32516, 2026). The federal recovery plan divides the species' range into five conservation units and requires healthy populations in every one of them before the bee can come off the list. Virginia anchors the southeastern unit. If our cluster blinks out, recovery becomes mathematically impossible. No amount of good work in Minnesota can substitute for it.

Right now, the number of populations meeting the federal definition of healthy, in our unit and in every other unit, is zero (USFWS Species Status Review 2024). The Service's timeline says delisting could happen as soon as 2061 if the work is funded and done (USFWS 2021). That is a long arc. It is also roughly the time horizon a family office already uses when it thinks about the next generation.

The moment

Three things happened in 2026 that make this the year to move.

On June 1, the Fish and Wildlife Service finalized critical habitat for the species, about 1.5 million acres across six states, and Virginia is one of them. On May 1, the Service signed a Conservation Benefit Agreement for the bumble bee, a voluntary program that lets private landowners enroll their land in recovery with regulatory assurances in return. And as of the final rule's publication, not a single acre anywhere in the country had yet enrolled (91 FR 32516, 2026).

The enrollment book is open. Virginia landowners could be the first names in it.

But how?

What follows is a five year, roughly $5 million private philanthropic program. All figures below are my estimates, built from the federal recovery budget and comparable state programs, and offered as a starting frame rather than a quote. It amounts to about a third of the entire national recovery cost estimate, aimed at the one piece of the range no one else is covering.

First, find the bee: an estimated $1.5 to 2 million over five years. You cannot recover what you cannot count, and counting is the single largest line in the federal recovery budget, roughly $8 million of the $16.5 million total (USFWS 2021). Minnesota has a Bumble Bee Atlas. So do Missouri, the Great Plains states, and the Pacific Northwest (Xerces Society 2024). Virginia does not. A Virginia and West Virginia Bumble Bee Atlas, built on the Xerces Society's proven model, would likely run $250,000 to $400,000 a year for a full time coordinator, volunteer training, verification and equipment. Hundreds of trained community scientists adopting survey grids across the Highlands. Every other dollar in this plan gets smarter because of this one.

Second, restore the core at an estimated $2 million over five years. The Nature Conservancy already runs an Allegheny Highlands program anchored by the 9,000 acre Warm Springs Mountain Preserve in Bath County, with a long record of conservation easements and some of the largest collaborative prescribed burns in the country (TNC Virginia 2026). The missing piece isn't forest, it's flowers. This bee needs continuous bloom from April to October, undisturbed nesting cavities, and wooded ground where queens overwinter, all within flight distance of each other (USFWS 2021). This money buys prescribed fire, open canopy restoration, late mowing agreements on pastures and utility corridors, native seed, and stewardship endowments so the work outlives the grant.

Third, open the landowner door, which would cost an estimated $750,000. Fund the technical assistance, enrollment costs, and planting support for private farms and estates joining the new Conservation Benefit Agreement. This is where a donor with Virginia land can stop writing checks and starts participating, which in my experience is the relationship that lasts.

Fourth, address what's killing them, plain and simple. This could be an estimated $500,000 for pesticide use mapping around occupied areas, integrated pest management partnerships with neighboring farms, and pathogen screening. I'll add a piece here that costs almost nothing and that we intend to work on ourselves: pathogen spillover from managed bees. Commercial bumble bee colonies and dense honeybee operations near wild populations are documented stressors, and the recovery plan calls specifically for clean stock practices and beekeeper outreach (USFWS 2021). That something that can be done beekeeper to beekeeper and through Virginia’s beekeeping associations.

Finally, a convening budget: an estimated $250,000. Virginia's quiet institutional problem is that no single agency owns this bee. The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services is the legal lead for listed insects, the Department of Conservation and Recreation's Natural Heritage Program does the survey work, and the Department of Wildlife Resources manages the habitat and owns the best known site (Virginia DWR 2025). Three agencies, each holding a piece, none with a budget to convene the others. Philanthropy can supply what they cannot which is a table and money already sitting on it. I'd argue this line buys more than any other and it could be funded through the collective of partners representing the Virginia Funders Network if they’d be willing to make a commitment on behalf of the common good of the Commonwealth and not just their own home counties.

The partners

None of this requires inventing an organization. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation runs the Atlas model and petitioned for the bee's listing in the first place (Xerces Society 2026). The Nature Conservancy's Virginia chapter has the land, the fire crews and the landowner relationships in exactly the right counties. Virginia Working Landscapes, a Smithsonian program, has been surveying native bees on private lands in the region for years. The three state agencies bring legal authority, data and public land. The Fish and Wildlife Service brings the recovery plan and the new enrollment tools. Add the regional land trusts, the university entomology programs at Virginia Tech and UVA, and the farmers and estate owners of the Highlands themselves.

What success looks like

If this works, by the early 2030s Virginia has the first complete picture of its bumble bee populations in history, the first Conservation Benefit Agreement acres enrolled in the nation, measurable growth in occupied territory in the Highlands, and a working model that the recovery plan's other four conservation units can copy. The rusty patched bumble bee doesn't come off the endangered list by 2031. But the southeastern leg of its recovery, the one that was closest to failing, becomes the one that's furthest ahead.

And the bee is only the sharpest point of a bigger story. The same meadows, burns, bloom calendars and pesticide practices that recover this species carry dozens of other declining native bees, the monarchs, the grassland birds. Virginia's Natural Heritage Program recently produced the state's first comprehensive list of native bees, and it runs to hundreds of species (Virginia DCR 2021). A commonwealth that produced the ecological thinking of Monticello's gardens and is home to the country’s first public conservationist (James Madison) ought to be the state that shows what pollinator recovery looks like when someone actually pays for it.

Sixteen and a half million dollars for a species. Five million for the piece that decides whether recovery is possible at all. I've seen single rubber chicken fundraising and awards galas cost more - never mind the hundreds of millions spent on political campaigns.

If you're a funder, a landowner in the Highlands, or someone who runs one of the institutions named above and wants to build this, my inbox is open. I'll bring the mead.

Sources

82 FR 3186. 2017. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Endangered Species Status for Rusty Patched Bumble Bee. Final rule, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, January 11, 2017.

91 FR 32516. 2026. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Designation of Critical Habitat for the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee. Final rule, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, June 1, 2026.

NRDC. 2026. "U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Finalizes Critical Habitat Protections for Endangered Rusty Patched Bumblebee." Press release, May 29, 2026.

The Nature Conservancy in Virginia. 2026. "Allegheny Highlands Program" and "Warm Springs Mountain Preserve." nature.org.

USFWS. 2021. Recovery Plan for the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee (Bombus affinis). U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwest Regional Office, Bloomington, MN.

USFWS. 2024. Rusty Patched Bumble Bee (Bombus affinis) Species Status Review. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Virginia DCR. 2021. "Protecting the Pollinator Population." Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Natural Heritage Program.

Virginia DWR. 2025. "Rusty Patched Bumble Bee." Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, dwr.virginia.gov.

Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 2026. Bumble Bee Atlas program materials and critical habitat statements. xerces.org and bumblebeeatlas.org.

Paul Polman, the former chief executive of Unilever, marked the day with a piece worth your time. His central move is an accounting one. A stable date, he points out, does not mean a stable system: a household that overspends by 73 percent every year is still heading for bankruptcy even if the overspend never grows. Since overshoot began in the early 1970s, those annual shortfalls have compounded into an ecological deficit he puts at more than twenty years of the planet’s total biological productivity.

Then he makes the observation I keep coming back to: financial debts can be refinanced or written off. Extinct species, drained aquifers, and collapsed ecosystems cannot.

The debt framing is right but there is more to this.

If nature is a creditor, it is a creditor of a peculiar kind. It has extended enormous credit. It bears the risk of the enterprise. And it has no ability whatsoever to collect.

It cannot send an invoice, call a loan, attach an asset, vote its shares, or sue for breach. It cannot appear at the meeting where the decision gets made. The debt is real, the loss is permanent, and the party owed it has no standing anywhere in the system that produced it.

That is not a shortfall of information. We have measured this deficit to the day, every year, for half a century, with steadily improving precision. It is a shortfall of standing.

Polman sets two numbers beside each other that make this concrete. Private investment in artificial intelligence, he notes, reached almost $345 billion last year. Private investment in nature-based solutions came to about $23 billion. Alphabet alone expects to spend between $175 and $185 billion in capital expenditure this year, roughly eight times what all private capital worldwide puts into nature.

He reads this as a failure to understand where prosperity comes from. I would add a step to that.

Capital flows toward artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence has owners. It has boards that must approve budgets. It has shareholders who can remove directors who underinvest. It has contracts that bind, competitors whose gains land on somebody’s quarterly numbers, and analysts who ask why you are behind. Every one of those is a mechanism that compels attention whether or not a single person in the room feels moved.

Nature has none of them. It has reports about it, targets referencing it, and speeches praising it, but no seat, no vote, no lien, no cause of action.

Money does not move because something is important. Money moves because something in the structure makes it move. We built extraordinary machinery for compelling attention to shareholder capital and almost none for compelling attention to natural capital. Then we express surprise each July when the ratio comes out eight to one.

This is worth sitting with, because it reframes what looks like indifference. The people allocating that capital are not, for the most part, unaware of ecological limits. Many of them have read the same reports we have. They are operating inside a structure where one set of obligations carries teeth and the other carries none, and structures of that kind produce their outcome regardless of what anyone privately believes.

Polman closes on courage. The solutions, he writes, are no longer obscure or unaffordable, and what remains absent is the will to make them central.

This is where I have come to a slightly different view, and it is the reason I spent the past year coding companies rather than writing about them. I wrote that research up here two weeks ago, so I will not repeat it, except for the one finding that bears directly on Polman’s conclusion.

I looked at companies that had already acted. Every one of them gives away at least one percent of sales to environmental causes, voluntarily, year after year, whether or not anyone is watching. Whatever else is true, these are not people short of will.

They stop anyway. Almost all of them stop at operations: cleaner sourcing, a certification, a footprint reduced. Across ten industries, none had given nature a formal voice in governance, a binding hold on ownership, or any claim that could be enforced against the company itself.

That is a strange result if the constraint is courage. These are the willing, and the willing stopped.

My reading is that they ran out of vocabulary. There is a well-developed language for measuring a footprint and shrinking it, and almost none for what follows. Who speaks for nature when this company decides something. What stops the next owner from reversing all of it. To whom is this company actually answerable. Most firms have never been offered a way to ask those questions, let alone answer them.

Polman’s own list rewards a close reading here. He calls for nature to enter budgets, procurement, industrial strategy, and capital allocation. Every one of those is a management decision, and every one is necessary. But a management decision can be unmade by the next manager. Nature does not need to be considered more carefully by the people in the room. It needs to be one of the parties.

I run a small meadery and apiary in Virginia. We are certified pollinator friendly, we keep close to a hundred hives, and we give away our one percent like everyone else in that sample.

We have done some of the structural work. Our mission as a nature-based company is written into our articles and bylaws, not left to the good intentions of whoever happens to be running the place. That was deliberate, and it means a future owner inherits the commitment rather than a preference.

What we do not yet have is a voice. Nobody sits at our board with the defined job of speaking for nature, holding a vote, and being answerable for that and nothing else. Everyone weighs nature in decisions, and that is genuinely how we operate, on the good days and the expensive ones. But everyone’s duty is nobody’s mandate. When a hard trade-off arrives, and it does, there is no one in the room whose only question is what this costs the living world. We are working toward that seat. We have not filled it.

I find that gap instructive, because it is the reverse of what you might expect. We locked the commitment into the constitution before we gave nature anyone to speak for it. Which suggests these are not rungs to climb in order. They are separate pieces of work, and a company can be further along on one than another without noticing the hole.

Overshoot Day has now sat within roughly the same few weeks of the calendar for more than fifteen years. It did not settle there because the problem stabilised. It settled there because nothing in the structure that produces the overshoot has changed, and stable structures produce stable results.

Next July the date will land in about the same week. It will keep landing there until the party carrying the loss has some way to act on its own behalf, rather than depending on the goodwill of the people spending it.

The bill is real. The creditor still cannot file. That is the work.

John Kluge Jr. is the founder of Thistlerock Mead Co. in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is writing a book on nature-centred business. He is co-author of Banking on Belonging (Columbia University Press, 2026)

Every business depends on nature. Almost none of them answer to it. A company draws down soil, water, pollinators, timber, fish, and a stable climate, treats each as free, and passes the bill to the future. This paper sets out a framework, called The Tree, for businesses and investors that want to change that: to move nature from the edge of the balance sheet to the centre of how a company is run, governed, and owned.

The framework has five parts, each matching a part of a tree. Leaves: measure it. Branches: improve it. Trunk: represent it. Roots: lock it in. Seeds: answer to it. A mature tree carries all five at once. So does a mature nature-centred business. The parts are not steps to climb one at a time but parts to grow together.

The paper also reports early research. When I coded 122 companies in one category of a network of businesses that have each pledged money to the environment, 84 percent showed no public sign of any nature practice beyond the pledge itself. The ones that did the most still stopped at cleaner operations and a certification. None gave nature a seat in its governance. None wrote nature into its ownership. None answered to nature in any way a court could enforce. The gap between caring about nature and building around it is wide, and almost no one has crossed it. That gap is the subject of this work. 

1. The problem: a stakeholder with no seat

The title of this paper is a translation. Dòigh Nàdair is Scottish Gaelic for the way of nature, and the phrase carries two meanings at once. It names the way nature itself works: patient, reciprocal, varied, and built to last across generations rather than quarters. And it names a way of doing business that takes its lead from that: a firm run in nature's manner rather than against it. The Tree, the framework set out below, is the method. The way of nature is the point of it. What follows is an attempt to say, in plain and practical terms, what it means to run a company the way of nature, and why the firms that learn to do it will outlast the ones that do not.

Business runs on nature. The food industry rests on soil and pollinators, the drinks industry on clean water, textiles on cotton and wool, medicine on wild compounds, and every industry on a climate that stays inside the range farming and cities were built for. The World Economic Forum has put more than half of world output as moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services (World Economic Forum 2020).

Yet nature sits at no table where its fate is decided. It cannot own shares, cast a vote, sign a contract, or sue. So a firm treats nature as both a free store and a free drain, and the true cost lands later and elsewhere: in dead soil, empty seas, lost insects and vanished species, and supply chains that snap. The loss of the living world's variety, its biodiversity, is the clearest name for what a firm draws down when it treats nature as free, and the hardest to win back once gone. The scale of the mismatch is stark. The United Nations Environment Programme finds that money flowing into nature-based solutions runs at roughly 220 billion dollars a year, against roughly 7 trillion dollars a year flowing into activities that harm nature, with the flow into nature needing to reach about 571 billion dollars a year by 2030 to meet agreed targets (United Nations Environment Programme 2023).

Behind the numbers sits a stance. A firm that treats nature as a free store and a free drain is taking without giving back, and the name for the opposite of that is reciprocity: the plain idea that what a firm draws from the living world it also owes to it. This is not a soft notion. It is the same logic that governs any lasting relationship with a supplier, a workforce, or a town. You do not exhaust the thing you depend on and expect it to be there next year. Reciprocity with nature was once a widely held human inheritance, not the property of any single culture. It survives most clearly today in Indigenous traditions, and this framework learns from them; its aim is to turn that reciprocity from a sentiment into a structure a firm can be held to.

Many cast this as a problem for governments and treaties. It is also a problem of how firms are built. A company is a set of choices about what it measures, what it improves, who speaks in its decisions, what its owners may and may not do, and whom it must answer to. At present those choices leave nature out. The argument of this paper is that they can be made to include it, and that the firms which do so will prove more durable as the century wears on.

2. Why existing approaches fall short

Two large bodies of thought already speak to this, and each stops short.

The first is nature writing, in the broad sense: the books and ideas that rebuild a felt bond between people and the living world. This work matters, and the science now backs its intuition. Nature connectedness is a measurable trait, tracked with tested scales, and it predicts both wellbeing and care for the environment (Richardson 2025). But this writing rarely reaches the firm. It can move a reader; it does not tell a founder what to change on Monday.

The second is sustainable business. Over thirty years it has grown sharp on measurement, risk, and reporting. It tells firms to count their footprint and shrink it. This too matters, and much of it works. But it treats nature as a risk to manage or a cost to cut, and it stops at the edge of the two questions that decide the matter: who holds power in the firm, and who owns it. A carbon report does not give nature a voice. A recycling target does not stop a new owner from reversing course.

So one tradition holds the feeling and the other holds the tools, and neither joins the felt bond to the hard questions of power and ownership. The Way of Nature is an attempt to join them.

3. The framework: The Tree

A tree is a fitting image because a healthy one holds all its parts at once and each part does distinct work. The framework maps five kinds of nature commitment onto five parts of a tree. They deepen as they go, from watching nature to answering to it, and a firm can and should grow several at the same time.

Leaves — Measure it. Leaves are where a tree meets the air: the most visible part, the part that responds first. For a firm, it means knowing and disclosing its bond with nature: both what it draws from nature and what it does to nature. The key move is to count nature itself, not only carbon. Carbon accounting is not wrong; it is partial. A firm can go carbon-neutral and still do nothing for the living systems around it, because carbon and biodiversity are not the same thing. Biodiversity, the variety of living things and the health of the systems they form, is the large part that carbon math leaves out, and until lately it was thought too complex to measure. That has changed. Firms can now read biodiversity from traces of genetic material left in soil and water, which turns "we help nature" from a claim into a number (see NatureMetrics, in the evidence base). A shared method now defines a single unit of biodiversity gain as a one percent improvement per unit of land (Wallacea Trust 2022). And new disclosure and policy frameworks, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the global agreement struck at Kunming-Montreal in 2022, are pushing firms to report what they draw from nature and what they do to it (TNFD 2023; Convention on Biological Diversity 2022). Measurement is the start because a firm cannot improve, govern, or lock in what it has not learned to see.

Branches — Improve it. Branches are where a tree does its work and grows its reach. For a firm, it means changing what it makes and how it sources and operates so that its activity restores nature rather than merely harming it less. Regenerative and organic farming, verified by an outside body, sits here, as does designing a product to give something back to the living world. But improvement runs wider than a firm's own operations. A firm can protect habitat directly, funding or holding land for conservation so that living systems are kept intact. It can go further and pay to rewild degraded land, letting nature return and often building a business on the result: one rewilded English estate, once ploughed for crops, now runs safaris, wild-range meat, and events, and measured roughly a seventy percent gain in biodiversity against a conventional neighbour (see the evidence base). And where a firm cannot restore nature on its own ground, it can pay others to, through the young market in biodiversity credits, which lets a firm fund a measured gain in living systems somewhere its money can do more. The test throughout is whether the gain is real and checked, not merely asserted. On the credit market that test is not yet settled: the market is early, and whether a credit represents a gain that is real, lasting, and additional is still contested and needs scrutiny before a firm leans on it.

Trunk — Represent it. The trunk is where a tree stands. It is also, in law, where the deepest idea in this framework lives: standing, the right to be heard. Half a century ago the legal scholar Christopher Stone asked whether trees should have standing to sue, and argued that natural things could hold rights defended by guardians in court (Stone 1972). To represent nature is to give it a real voice inside the firm's decisions: a seat on the board, a guardian with a defined remit, a duty every director carries. One British company, Faith in Nature, has appointed a director to speak for nature at the board, with a vote (see the evidence base). Recent legal work has begun to turn this from a single case into a repeatable method. The Earth Law Center's Onboarding Nature Toolkit, which won the 2026 Grunin Prize at New York University's law school, sets out four ways to bring nature inside a firm: as inspiration, written into a firm's stated purpose; as advisor, through a dedicated seat; as director, with a voice and a vote in governance; and as shareholder, through ownership and voting arrangements (Earth Law Center 2025; Ioselevich 2026). The first three of these sit at the trunk. The fourth reaches down to the roots, which the next level takes up. As one of the toolkit's authors put it, the aim is not to change the law but to repurpose it (Ioselevich 2026). This is rare work, and it is the hinge of the whole framework, because it is where nature stops being a topic and starts being a party.

Roots — Lock it in. Roots are unseen, permanent, and load-bearing; they hold the tree when the wind comes. For a firm, this is writing the commitment into ownership and constitution so it survives a change of leader, a cash crunch, or a sale. The tools are real and growing: steward-ownership, perpetual purpose trusts, golden shares held by a mission body, charity ownership. When Patagonia's founder gave the company away in 2022, he placed its shares in a trust and a non-profit built to keep its purpose beyond his life (see the evidence base). The same legal toolkit that puts nature on the board also treats nature as a kind of shareholder, embedding its interests in ownership through steward-ownership, golden shares, or weighted votes (Earth Law Center 2025). Without roots, every gain at the other levels can be undone by the next owner.

Seeds — Answer to it. Seeds are what a tree gives back, and how life carries past the single tree. For a firm, this is the deepest level: to operate under, fund, and defer to arrangements where nature holds rights that can be enforced against the firm itself. The rights-of-nature movement has moved from theory into law, and its roots are older than the law that carries it. Ecuador wrote the rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, drawing directly on the Andean Indigenous principle of sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, good living, in which humans belong to nature rather than owning it and owe it reciprocal care (Erazo Acosta 2022). From that soil the movement has spread: New Zealand has granted legal personhood to a river; Spain has given its first ecosystem, the Mar Menor lagoon, rights defended by guardians (Cano Pecharromán 2022); and in Peru, native stingless bees have been recognised as holders of rights, a reciprocal duty owed to the pollinators a community depends on (see the evidence base). To answer to nature is to accept that the firm's own conduct can be checked by nature's defenders, not only by its owners. It is reciprocity made enforceable.

Two points hold the framework together. First, it runs from managing nature to answering to it. Each level hands more real power to nature, and gives up more of the firm's freedom to treat nature as it likes. Second, the goal is the whole tree, not the top of a ladder. A firm can measure and improve while it begins the slower work of governance and ownership. What it should not do is mistake one part for the whole. A firm with clean operations and no voice for nature in its rooms is a firm with one good branch, not a tree.

4. Early evidence: the gap is wide

To test whether the framework describes something real, I began coding companies against it. The first study took 122 companies in one category, adult drinks, of a network whose members each give at least one percent of sales to environmental causes. Each company was checked against public sources for certifications, practices, governance, and ownership.

Two findings stand out. First, among the companies with a real public record, commitment ran out fast. Every one of them reached the improve level. About a third held an outside certification for organic, biodynamic, or pollinator-friendly practice. Most held a soft governance mark, usually B Corp status. Then it stopped. Not one gave nature a formal voice in its governance. Not one held a binding lock on its ownership. Not one measured living nature rather than carbon, or answered to nature in any enforceable way.

Second, and more telling, most of the category showed almost nothing at all. Of the 122, 102, which is 84 percent, carried no public sign of any nature practice beyond the giving pledge. A later scan across ten categories and 293 companies found the same shape, sharper: 93 percent carried no public record beyond the pledge, and again the upper levels of the framework sat empty across every category.

Two cautions matter. This is a chosen sample, not a random draw, so the figures describe what the field makes public, not the whole population; a separate study draws a random sample from a defined list to test the pattern properly. And "no public record" is not proof of "doing nothing", since a small firm may do real work it never writes down. The finding is about what firms disclose and build, not a charge that they are idle. Even read carefully, though, the result is plain: in a group already willing to give money for nature, the deeper forms of commitment are rare, and the deepest are all but absent. The gap the framework describes is real, and it is the opportunity.

5. Four practices the framework proposes

Alongside the five levels, the work names four practices that do not yet exist as settled standards. Each has a working precedent; none has been named and shaped into a method others can copy.

A nature label. A per-product disclosure of nature impact, in the way some firms already print a carbon figure. It would show the land a product used, the certification behind it, and the nature contribution built into each unit sold. It need not be perfect to be useful; it needs to be honest and specific enough to compare.

A connectedness test. A question asked in the design of a product or service: does using this bring a person into contact with the living world, or wall them off from it? The science gives this weight. Since connectedness predicts both wellbeing and care for nature, a product that builds it is doing real work, and almost no design team asks the question on purpose.

A family programme. An employer benefit aimed at the strongest lever in the whole system. The evidence is clear that a parent's own bond with nature is the strongest predictor of a child's, so the decline passes down through families (Richardson 2025). A firm that helps its people build their children's bond with nature works the one lever with the most reach, and no employer yet does this on purpose.

Unit-level nature accounting. A fixed nature contribution tied to each unit sold, set as a cost rather than a gift at year's end. When the contribution is specific and built into the price, the commitment is legible to the buyer and hard to drop.

6. The long horizon

Behind every level of the framework sits a question of time. A firm that answers to nature is a firm that has widened the horizon it plans against, from the next quarter to the next century and beyond. This is the deepest reason the framework is hard: not that its tools are missing, but that most firms are built to work to a span of months, and nature keeps time in decades and generations.

The habit of short horizons is itself a large part of the problem. Quarterly reporting rewards the near term and discounts the far; a cost that lands in thirty years barely registers in a model built around the next earnings call. Soil, forests, fisheries, and the climate all pay the price of that discount. To put nature at the centre of a firm is, in large part, to lengthen the horizon the firm plans against.

Indigenous practice has held this longer view for centuries, and it offers a plain standard the framework can borrow. The clearest form of it is the seventh-generation principle of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Six Nations also known as the Iroquois, whose Great Law of Peace holds that every major decision be weighed by its effect on the seventh generation to come (Haudenosaunee Confederacy, n.d.). The teaching is not the Haudenosaunee's alone; related ideas run through Anishinaabe, Maori, and many other Indigenous traditions. But its source is specific, and it deserves to be named rather than folded into a vague appeal to ancient wisdom. The investor and author Jenna Nicholas brings this principle into the language of finance in her book The Enlightened Bottom Line, using it to challenge the short-termism of quarterly reporting: she asks investors and business leaders to weigh a decision against seven generations ahead and seven behind, and holds that every choice a person makes as an investor, an employer, or a buyer leaves a trace, so the work is to make sure the trace is one of healing rather than harm (Nicholas 2026). A firm that asks what its choices do to the seventh generation is a firm already growing roots and seeds, because those are the levels where a commitment is built to outlast its makers.

Seen this way, the whole framework is an argument about time. Measuring and improving are the near work. Representing, locking in, and answering to nature are the long work, the parts that hold when leaders change and quarters turn. A firm that treats nature seriously is a firm that has decided to be a good ancestor.

7. Why now

Three shifts make this the moment. Nature has become a measured financial risk, named as such by central banks and by the reporting standards firms now face. The rights-of-nature idea has crossed from seminar to statute in several countries. And steward-ownership, once a curiosity, has entered the mainstream since a large company was given to a trust to protect its purpose. At the same time, public money for nature is retreating in many places, which makes the private structures set out here matter more, not less. The firms that learn to measure, improve, represent, lock in, and answer to nature will be better placed as the century's pressures grow. The rest will meet those pressures having built nothing to meet them with. To run a company the way of nature, dòigh nàdair, is not a retreat from hard business. It is the longer and steadier form of it: patient where the market is hasty, reciprocal where the market is extractive, and built, like a tree, to stand.

8. Literature review

This section places the framework within existing work across five fields. It is selective, not exhaustive, and aims to show both the ground the framework stands on and the gap it fills.

Biodiversity's worth and the scale of the shortfall. A now-large body of work has tried to state, in economic terms, how far nature underpins the economy. The Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the British government, argued that standard economics has treated nature as limitless and that growth measured without it is a false account (Dasgupta 2021). The World Economic Forum put over half of world output as dependent to some degree on nature (World Economic Forum 2020). The United Nations Environment Programme has measured the money gap between what nature receives and what nature needs (United Nations Environment Programme 2023). Together these set the size of the problem. They do not tell a single firm what to build, which is the work this framework takes up.

Rights of nature and legal standing. The legal root of the framework is Stone's 1972 argument that natural objects could hold rights, defended by guardians (Stone 1972). For years the idea stayed largely academic. It has since become law in several forms: legal personhood for rivers and forests, constitutional rights for nature, and, in Europe, rights for the Mar Menor lagoon (Cano Pecharromán 2022). A growing literature tracks how these arrangements work in practice and where they fall short. The framework draws on this work for its two deepest levels, represent and answer, and treats the firm, not only the state, as a place where standing can be granted.

Steward-ownership and mission lock. A separate literature, closer to practice than to theory, examines how firms protect a purpose against the pull of sale and short-term gain. It covers perpetual purpose trusts, golden shares, and foundation ownership, and points to long-standing European examples where a trust or foundation holds a company for its mission. The gift of Patagonia to a trust and a non-profit in 2022 brought the idea wide attention. Practitioner work has since started to join ownership design to nature directly: the Earth Law Center's Onboarding Nature Toolkit, honoured at New York University's law school in 2026, offers firms four models for giving nature a place in governance and ownership, from a line in the founding documents to a seat on the board to a stake held on nature's behalf (Earth Law Center 2025; Ioselevich 2026). The framework's roots level rests on this work and applies it to nature in particular: not purpose in general, but a lock that holds nature's place when owners change.

Biodiversity measurement, credits, and rewilding. A newer and less settled literature concerns how to measure gains in living systems and pay for them. Methods now exist to read biodiversity from environmental DNA and to define a credit as a fixed improvement per unit of land (Wallacea Trust 2022), and a market in such credits has begun to form. This work is promising and contested in equal measure: writers on the subject warn that a credit is only as good as its proof that the gain is real, lasting, and additional, and that credits should top up direct action rather than stand in for it. Alongside the credit literature sits a growing literature on rewilding as a business, showing that letting degraded land return to life can produce measured biodiversity gains and a working income at once. The framework draws on both, and carries their caution: measurement is real enough to build on, the markets built on it are young enough to watch closely.

Time horizons and long-term value. A final strand concerns the cost of short horizons. A wide literature in finance and management treats short-termism, the pull of quarterly results, as a drag on long-term value. A parallel body of thought reaches past finance to Indigenous governance, above all the Haudenosaunee seventh-generation principle, for a longer measure of what a firm owes the future; Nicholas (2026) is a recent attempt to carry that measure into everyday investment practice. The framework's two deepest levels, lock it in and answer to it, are attempts to build that longer horizon into the structure of a firm rather than leaving it to the good intentions of whoever holds the reins.

Nature connectedness. In environmental psychology, a mature literature now treats the human bond with nature as a measurable trait. Tested scales capture it; large studies link it to both wellbeing and care for the environment (Richardson 2025). Recent modelling adds two findings the framework leans on: the bond has fallen far over two centuries in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, and its strongest driver is passage from parent to child rather than a person's own experience (Richardson 2025). This body of work answers the oldest objection to the softer side of this field, that the human bond with nature cannot be measured, and so lets the framework rest its human-facing practices on evidence rather than sentiment.

Reciprocity and the ethics of relationship. The framework's deepest levels rest on an older idea than any of the above: that the human relationship with nature is one of mutual obligation, not ownership. This idea recurs across cultures rather than belonging to one. In the Andes it is named sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, and has passed from Indigenous practice into Ecuador's constitution and the wider rights-of-nature movement (Erazo Acosta 2022; Richter 2025). Among the Haudenosaunee it runs through the Great Law and the Thanksgiving Address (Haudenosaunee Confederacy, n.d.). The botanist and Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer has brought the idea to a wide modern readership, framing the natural world as a gift economy in which receiving creates an obligation to give back (Kimmerer 2013). And it is not solely a distant or non-European inheritance. Celtic peoples across Iron Age Europe held particular natural places as sacred, groves, springs, and oaks above all, and centred ritual life on them rather than on built temples; the sacred grove, or nemeton, is attested in Roman accounts, inscriptions, and place-names that survive from Iberia to Scotland to Asia Minor (Koch 2006). The written record of Celtic religion is thin and largely filtered through hostile Roman sources, so it must be read with care, but the reverence for the living world it points to is plain. The through line is that treating nature as kin, and as owed, was once broadly human; industrial economies are the anomaly for forgetting it. The framework does not import this ethic for show. It tries to give it a structure: to turn reciprocity from a felt duty into a governed one.

Sustainable business, measurement, and its limits. Finally, a vast literature on corporate sustainability covers footprint measurement, reporting standards, certification, and the business case for cutting environmental harm. Its strength is method; its blind spot is power and ownership. It rarely asks who speaks for nature in the firm's decisions, or how a commitment survives a change of owner. The gap between this literature's tools and the two traditions above, rights and stewardship on one side, connectedness on the other, is the space this framework is built to fill.

Across all five fields the pattern is the same. The pieces exist. What has been missing is a single frame that a founder, an investor, or a board can use to see where a firm stands and what it might build next. That is what The Tree is meant to provide.

References

Cano Pecharromán, Lidia. 2022. "Rights of Nature: Rivers That Can Stand in Court." Resources 11 (2): 17.

Convention on Biological Diversity. 2022. Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Montreal: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Dasgupta, Partha. 2021. The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury.

Earth Law Center. 2025. Onboarding Nature Toolkit. In collaboration with B Lab Benelux and Nyenrode Business University. Earth Law Center. https://www.earthlawcenter.org/naturegovernance.

Erazo Acosta, Eduardo. 2022. "Sumak Kawsay-Alli Kawsay-Buen Vivir, Epistemology in the Indigenous Communities of Ecuador and Colombia, an Opportunity for Environmental Justice and Rethinking the Global Community." In Economics and Policy of Energy and Environmental Sustainability, edited by Narendra N. Dalei and Anshuman Gupta. Singapore: Springer.

Haudenosaunee Confederacy. n.d. "Values." Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Accessed July 2026. https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/values/.

Ioselevich, Dmitriy. 2026. "Lawyers Rewrite the Rules of the Impact Economy." Impact Entrepreneur, July 16, 2026. https://impactentrepreneur.com/lawyers-rewrite-the-rules-of-the-impact-economy/.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Koch, John T., ed. 2006. Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Nicholas, Jenna. 2026. The Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing. Self-published.

Richardson, Miles. 2025. "Modelling Nature Connectedness within Environmental Systems: Human-Nature Relationships from 1800 to 2020 and Beyond." Earth 6 (3): 82. https://doi.org/10.3390/earth6030082.

Richter, Katharina. 2025. "Cosmological Limits to Growth, Affective Abundance, and Rights of Nature: Insights from Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay for the Cultural Politics of Degrowth." Ecological Economics 228: 108438.

Stone, Christopher D. 1972. "Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects." Southern California Law Review45: 450-501.

Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. 2023. Recommendations of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. TNFD.

United Nations Environment Programme. 2023. State of Finance for Nature 2023. Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme.

Wallacea Trust. 2022. Methodology for Awarding Biodiversity Credits. Wallacea Trust.

World Economic Forum. 2020. Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy. Geneva: World Economic Forum.

This is a working paper describing a framework in development. The research it reports is early and, where noted, drawn from chosen rather than random samples. Company examples come from a verified evidence base compiled for the book of the same name. Comments and challenges are welcome.

I confess an old man's habit of measuring the present against the design of the past, and I hope you will indulge it once more, for I find the exercise presses on me with unusual urgency.

You will recall — though perhaps only as a schoolbook footnote now — that the great labor of the Convention was not to prevent bad men from seeking power. That, we knew, could never be wholly prevented, in any age or any nation. Our labor was to build a structure in which bad designs, however cunningly pursued, would break upon the resistance of ambition checking ambition, of branch jealous of branch, of a Senate not moved by the passions of the hour and a House answerable to them. I wrote at the time, and believe still, that a dependence on the people is the primary control on government, but that experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions besides.

I set this down now because I have watched, from whatever vantage the dead are permitted, a man rise to your highest office who seems to me the very character our auxiliary precautions were built to contain — not a monarch by title, but by temperament: one who mistakes the Presidency for his person, who treats the courts as obstacles to be defied rather than as coordinate guardians of the same Constitution he is sworn to preserve, and who regards the public trust as an estate to be worked for private advantage rather than a trust to be rendered back undiminished.

I do not say this lightly, nor do I say it as a partisan of one faction against another — you will remember I despised the factional spirit itself, and warned against it before either of your present parties existed. But I must say plainly: a President who treats an adverse ruling as illegitimate rather than binding attacks the load-bearing wall of the whole edifice. I argued at the Convention, in language you may consult for yourselves, that impeachment was necessary because a chief magistrate might betray his trust to foreign powers, or turn his office into a scheme of private gain. I did not imagine these as remote hypotheticals. I put them into the frame because I believed some future generation would need the door I left open.

And yet I would be doing you a disservice, and myself an injustice, if I left you with only the alarm and not the diagnosis beneath it. A demagogue does not rise in a vacuum. He rises where the ordinary channels of representation have gone stale — where citizens feel, rightly or wrongly, that the distant apparatus of their government answers to itself and not to them. I insisted the House be elected directly and frequently for precisely this reason: that the People must never come to believe their government is a fixed estate belonging to others. If a great number of you now feel unheard by the very structures I helped build, that grievance is not proof of your foolishness. It is a signal the structure requires tending — and demagoguery is what fills the silence when tending is refused.

So I ask you to hold two things at once, difficult as it may be. The remedy for feeling unrepresented is not to invest your trust in one man's will above the office's constraints — that path, I promise you, ends in a worse and more durable capture than the one you sought to escape. But neither is the remedy to sneer at the grievance and call the matter settled. The Constitution I helped build was never meant to be admired like a finished painting. It was built to be tended — amended where amendment is due, defended where defense is due, and above all, understood by those it governs.

I wrote once that a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. You live now in an age of information without precedent in abundance, and I confess I do not know whether that cures the disease I feared or merely gives it new vectors. That, more than any single man's character, is the question I would spend my remaining attention upon, were I granted it.

Guard the office from the officeholder. Guard the structure from the moment. And do not mistake exhaustion with your institutions for permission to abandon them.

I remain, as ever, your fellow citizen in the labor of self-government,

A Publius for the present hour

Author's note: This piece is a work of speculative interpretation, not a historical document — an attempt to reason from Madison's actual writings (Federalist 10, 51, and his remarks at the Constitutional Convention on impeachment) toward what he might say, not a claim about what he did say.

#july4 #constitution #jamesmadison #governance

I think about that a lot this week.

On Friday, the Trump administration issued a policy memo eliminating what immigration lawyers call “adjustment of status” — the longstanding process by which people already living legally in the United States can apply for permanent residency without leaving. From now on, most temporary visa holders who qualify for a green card must return to their home countries to complete the process through a consulate.

At first glance this might sound like a procedural tweak. It is not. It is, depending on where you’re from, a trap with no exit.

Here’s why. The same administration that issued Friday’s memo has also banned nationals from more than 100 countries from obtaining U.S. visas. So the directive — go home, apply at a consulate, come back — assumes a functional return path that simply does not exist for enormous numbers of people. A Somali family that came here legally, built a business, enrolled their kids in school, paid taxes for a decade — they are being told to return to a country they may have fled for their lives, stand before a consulate officer operating under a travel ban, and try to come back. That is not a process. That is a door that has been bricked over and painted to look like it still opens.

Immigration lawyers estimate this policy could affect hundreds of thousands of people who file adjustment applications every year — graduate students who earned their degrees at American universities and got sponsored by American employers, nurses and doctors who staffed understaffed rural hospitals through the pandemic, elderly parents of American citizens who came to be near their families in their final years. These are not abstractions. They are people embedded in American communities, American institutions, American families. Ripping legal status from them doesn’t make those communities safer or more prosperous. It makes them hollower.

When legal status is stripped away, the costs don’t disappear. Some are measurable — informal labor, uncompensated emergency healthcare, kids falling through educational gaps, lost tax revenue — real burdens that land on municipalities, hospitals, schools, and communities rather than on any ledger the administration has to answer for. The people making the decision don’t bear those costs. So from where they sit, it looks free.

It isn’t. There are costs that don’t show up in budgets at all. A family separated across two continents because a consulate won’t issue a visa. A child who grows up knowing their parent was legal here until the government decided legality was inconvenient. A doctor who spent fifteen years serving a rural community and is now gone. And then there is what this does to the country’s reputation — the signal it sends to every skilled worker, every researcher, every entrepreneur anywhere in the world who is weighing whether America is a place worth betting their life on. That calculation is not slowly changing. It has already changed. This policy is not an aberration — it is the continuation of a deliberate agenda, and the damage is severe, compounding, and happening right now. What makes it worse is that Congress and the Senate have had every opportunity to draw a line. They haven’t. That silence is its own kind of answer and every representative, every staffer, every aid who allow this to continue need to be held to account.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade working at the intersection of forced displacement and economic integration — first building the Refugee Investment Network, which works to mobilize private capital and develop the ecosystem for refugee economic inclusion, and more recently with my wife Christine Mahoney writing a book, Banking on Belonging, about what actually happens when societies choose to treat newcomers as contributors rather than threats. The evidence is not complicated. Legal stability is the variable that determines almost everything else. When people have it, they work, they start businesses, they buy homes, they send their children to school. When it’s stripped away — or made deliberately inaccessible — the costs don’t disappear. They just become invisible to the people who made the decision.

What makes me furious about Friday’s policy — and I want to use that word plainly — is the contempt it shows for the premise of the system itself. These are not people who gamed anything. They got visas, they reported to USCIS, they renewed their status, they hired immigration attorneys, they did exactly what the United States government told them to do to remain here legally. The implicit deal was: follow the rules and the pathway exists. That deal has now been voided. Not because they failed to comply. Because the administration decided the pathway itself was the problem.

That is not immigration enforcement. That is a betrayal.

When my mom became an American citizen, like every American immigrant, she pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and our laws, promised to defend the nation and perform civic duties. She’s voted in elections, raised a family, paid taxes, and built a full life here. She belongs here in the fullest sense, not just legally, but in the way that accumulates over years of ordinary life in a place. That didn’t happen automatically. It happened because a process existed that was, whatever its frustrations, a real process. It was a door that opened to her, and 24 million other naturalized patriots who went through the same process.

What was announced Friday is something different. It is the deliberate manufacture of a dead end — dressed in the language of procedure, justified with the rhetoric of integrity, aimed at people whose only crime is having believed that doing things the right way would matter.

So what do we do?

First, get informed. Then get loud. If you employ people affected by this — and if you run any kind of business in this country, you almost certainly do — say something publicly. The silence of the employer community on legal immigration restrictions has been one of the more disheartening features of the past several years. Economic self-interest and basic decency point in the same direction here. Use your voice.

Second, contact your representatives. This policy was issued as an administrative memo, which means it can be challenged, litigated, and legislated against. Organizations like the American Immigration Lawyers Association and World Relief are already mobilizing. Support them. Amplify them. Ask your senators and representatives specifically what they intend to do about a policy that strands legal residents in bureaucratic limbo with no viable path forward.

Third — and I say this as someone whose work is rooted in the belief that private capital and civil society can move faster than government — don’t mistake action for the absence of outrage. This requires both. The legal challenge matters. The political pressure matters. The moral clarity matters. Don’t let the complexity of the process become an excuse for doing nothing.

The people Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are targeting with this policy have done nothing wrong. They came legally. They stayed legally. They built lives here in good faith. That faith is not naive — it is precisely what we asked of them. That faith deserves defending. So does their right to stay.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) released a significant report this week — Creating Inclusive Urban Economies for Migrants and Refugees — and if you work in refugee economic inclusion, impact investing, or urban philanthropy, you should read it. It’s the most thorough synthesis I’ve seen of what cities are actually doing to connect migrants and refugees to economic opportunity, grounded in consultations across eight cities from Chiang Mai to Gdańsk to St. Louis.

It’s also, almost by design, a document that stops just short of the most important conversation, but this is more a consequence of its audience and not a criticism. The report is written for municipal policymakers, and it serves them well. But the argument it makes points directly toward a set of actors it never quite reaches: investors, employers, and philanthropists who could help change the capital picture entirely.

That’s the conversation I want to have.

What the Report Gets Right

The central claim is one Christine Mahoney and I make throughout our book Banking on Belonging: economic inclusion isn’t charity — it’s a growth strategy. The MPI/MMC report puts hard numbers to it. Underemployment among college-educated immigrants cost the U.S. economy an estimated $39 billion in forgone wages and more than $10 billion in lost tax revenue as of 2016. That’s a lot of cost for a lot of untapped human talent.

The report is clear-eyed about what cities actually control. National governments hold the strongest levers — work authorization, visa policy, credential recognition at scale. Cities are mostly working around those constraints, not through them. The best programs described here are intelligent workarounds: pooling fragmented administrative data, building employer-jobseeker matching services, embedding newcomer upskilling into green transition workforce programs, running one-stop service centers that reduce friction for people navigating unfamiliar systems.

Two things in particular stood out to me.

The distinction between opportunity-driven and necessity-driven entrepreneurship is one of the most important conceptual tools in this field, and the report deploys it carefully. Too many programs celebrate refugee business creation without asking whether the business is viable — or whether someone started it because the job market was closed to them. A survival food cart is not a scalable enterprise. Conflating the two serves no one, including the entrepreneur.

The report is also unusually honest about evaluation. Most economic inclusion programs don’t track job quality, income progression, or business survival after the program ends. The report frames this as a data problem. I’d call it something more serious: without that data, you cannot make a credible investment case to private capital. Participation rates don’t move institutional investors. Returns data does.

Where the Report’s Frame Runs Out

The report is frank about the funding crisis. U.S. aid cuts have forced organizations to close offices or cut services. Most programs in lower-income settings run on short-term, competitive donor funding that can disappear overnight. Even the stronger models, like Zurich’s Capacity program, which supported 172 entrepreneurs and helped develop 93 businesses over eight years, depend on volunteers because they can’t fund staff.

The report’s response to this is to gesture toward pooled funding models, blended finance, innovative financing. The Mexico pilot it describes — a fund drawing from philanthropy, employers, and multilateral banks, launching in July 2026 across Mexico City, Nuevo León, and Jalisco — is the right architecture and it is exciting to see. But the report describes it from the city’s perspective, as a mechanism to be accessed. It doesn’t examine what it takes to build that mechanism from the other side.

That’s where the private sector and philanthropy need to enter the room, not as funders of last resort, but as architects.

What the Investment Lens Adds

We started the Refugee Investment Network because the humanitarian system has chronically under-resourced the economic agency of displaced people, and because the investment world has chronically underestimated the opportunity. Banking on Belonging is, at its core, an argument that those two failures are connected — and that fixing one requires engaging the other.

The MPI/MMC report makes the economic case for inclusion. The investment case is related but not the same.

On blended finance: The report mentions it without unpacking what actually makes it work. The structural innovation is risk layering. Philanthropic or government capital absorbs the first losses; that makes the risk profile acceptable to institutional investors who follow. This has now worked in social impact bonds, in development finance, and in the refugee-focused investment funds that have begun to scale. Community foundations are uniquely positioned to play the first-loss role at the municipal level. Their mission already aligns with the community benefit. Their investment horizon is longer than a typical fund. Many are already doing program-related and mission-related investing in affordable housing and small business development. Refugee entrepreneurship is a natural extension of work already underway.

The city doesn’t have to be the lead capital. It can be the convener and the data provider while a community foundation anchors the blended structure. The report describes that model through the Mexico pilot without naming it as a replicable template for U.S. cities. It is.

On employer engagement: The report rightly frames employer connections as workforce development But the investment frame asks a different question: what is the return to the employer? In sectors with genuine labor scarcity — care work, green construction, food processing — the cost of an unfilled position is measurable. That cost is an investment thesis. Employers facing those shortages shouldn’t just be partners in workforce programs. They should be co-investors in the talent pipeline that fills their hiring needs. The report describes this as political strategy, building buy-in by demonstrating tangible returns. I’d push further: it’s a viable financial model, and it should be structured like one.

On patient capital: The Re:BUiLD program evidence, showing cash grants to refugee entrepreneurs outperformed mentorship in cost-effectiveness, in both Nairobi and Kampala, is one of the report’s most important data points. But it only measures short-term business outcomes. What the broader impact investing literature shows is that businesses receiving patient capital, follow-on investment, growth-stage loans, and working capital, are dramatically more likely to scale and create jobs. Most entrepreneurship support concentrates at the start-up phase and disappears just as ventures begin. The next iteration of this work is a fund story, not a program story: revolving loan funds, capitalized by community foundations and CDFIs, specifically targeting refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs who’ve cleared the idea stage and need growth capital.

On belonging as a performance variable: The report documents, across multiple country contexts, that social capital and local networks are among the most powerful determinants of economic inclusion outcomes. Somali refugees in Jijiga outperform those elsewhere in Ethiopia because of shared cultural systems and the economic networks those systems create. The Toronto mentoring program doubled employment rates because it gave newcomers access to professional relationships they had no other way to build. Migrants confined to ethnic enclaves grow more slowly than those integrated into mainstream business networks — which is why programs like Bogotá’s Migración Productiva focus specifically on embedding refugee entrepreneurs in local supply chains, not parallel ones.

This is the argument at the center of Banking on Belonging: inclusion isn’t just an output of economic integration — it’s an input. When people experience genuine belonging in a community, they invest in it. They hire from it. They pay taxes into it and stay. The ROI is real and measurable across business longevity, tax revenue, neighborhood vitality. Philanthropists and investors who treat belonging as infrastructure, not sentiment, are funding something with a genuine return.

A Direct Challenge to Community Foundations

The report calls for innovative financing at the city level and is transparent that it doesn’t have a clear answer for how to get there sustainably. I respect this honesty! Community foundations are well placed to help here but most cities and most community foundations aren’t working together on this.

Community foundations have local knowledge that no national foundation can replicate. They have community trust that city government often lacks. They have long investment horizons and the legal structures to hold both grant capital and investment capital in the same institution. And they are already doing the work — in affordable housing, small business loans, workforce development — that refugee economic inclusion plugs directly into.

What I’d ask them to consider, specifically:

Anchor a local blended finance vehicle. Work with city government as convener and data provider, and serve as the first-loss layer in a pooled fund targeting refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs. Employer contributions and CDFI capital follow you in. This is what the Mexico model does; it can be adapted for any mid-size American city with a meaningful refugee population and a labor shortage.

Fund outcome measurement as a standalone investment, not overhead. The report’s most consistent finding is that no one knows what works because no one is tracking what happens after the program ends. Longitudinal outcome data including job retention, income progression, business survival at two and five years is the evidence base that makes future capital deployment possible. Foundations that fund this infrastructure are building the field, not just a program.

Back employer-side engagement programs. The St. Louis Mosaic Project model that connects immigrant entrepreneurs with ethnic chambers of commerce, advising local businesses on how to access international talent, is generating returns visible to business leadership. That’s a different conversation than the one most social service funders have. It’s absolutely worth having.

Integrate refugee and immigrant entrepreneurship into existing small business portfolios rather than creating standalone refugee programs. The mainstreaming argument in the MPI/MMC report is right: programs that serve all residents are more sustainable, more politically durable, and better for the people they’re trying to help. A community foundation that adds an explicit refugee and immigrant inclusion lens to its existing SBDC partnerships and small business loan programs doesn’t need a new initiative. It needs a policy change.

What This Report Can’t Do on Its Own

Creating Inclusive Urban Economies for Migrants and Refugees is the clearest picture I’ve seen of what cities can accomplish with the levers they hold. The documentation of programs, the honest accounting of what’s working and what’s chronic and stuck, and the cross-regional scope make it genuinely useful to our field.

But the report’s core insight — that economic inclusion is an investment, not a cost — points toward a set of actors it cannot, by design, fully address. Cities can set agendas and break down siloes and run job fairs and match employers to workers. What they consistently don’t have is patient, flexible, appropriately-structured capital. And without that, the programs stay small, the promising models stay underfunded, and the entrepreneurs who could be building businesses that serve their communities for a generation are instead running survival enterprises or leaving the formal economy altogether.

The private sector, employers, investors, and philanthropists — especially community foundations — can change that math. The architecture exists. The evidence is building. The question is whether the people with capital will engage as investors or keep funding the gap with grants.

John Kluge Jr. is Co-Founder & CEO of Thistlerock Mead Company, Co-Founder of the Refugee Investment Network, and co-author (with Christine Mahoney) of Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone (Columbia University Press, July 2026).

Last night I stood in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress and offered a few remarks at the 25th anniversary of the John W. Kluge Center. It is a place I have visited many times over the years, for many different reasons. But standing at that podium, I kept thinking about a summer more than twenty years ago, and a man recovering from surgery who had more to say than anyone realized.

In 2005, shortly after graduating from Columbia, I spent the summer with my father as he healed from a hip operation. We talked for hours — the kind of unhurried, ranging conversations that only happen when the calendar clears and there is nowhere else to be. Stories surfaced that I had never heard. Connections between his life and his thinking that I had never understood. Out of that summer came a shared resolve: to gather his archives, organize them, and write down as many of those stories as seemed worthy of keeping.

I did that work at the Kluge Center. To sit in those study rooms in the Jefferson Building — surrounded by scholars of extraordinary accomplishment, each absorbed in their own pursuit of understanding — and pursue that quiet, personal project alongside them was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. The place has a particular quality. It takes serious thought seriously. In Washington, that is rarer than it should be.

My father founded the Center in 2000 with a gift of $60 million to the Library of Congress. His vision, developed in close collaboration with then-Librarian James Billington, was simple in conception and ambitious in scale: bring the world’s finest humanistic thinkers into residence at the Library, give them access to its unparalleled collections, and create the conditions for genuine conversation between scholars and the people who govern us. In the twenty-five years since, more than 1,000 scholars have passed through. They have written landmark books, shaped public debate, and helped Members of Congress and their staffs think more clearly about history, ethics, culture, and the long arc of human affairs.

Last night, I also told a story I have not told publicly before. At the 15th anniversary ScholarFest in June 2015, I attended a private dinner where Romila Thapar and Fernando Henrique Cardoso — two of the most luminous recipients of the Kluge Prize — spoke in conversation moderated by Center Director Jane McAuliffe. I brought a colleague from UVA, a scholar I was collaborating with at the time. I was careful, I recall, to clarify it was not a date. We returned a few months later for the ceremony honoring Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. Somewhere between those two evenings, something shifted. She is now my wife of ten years. We are raising a family together and still collaborating on work that sits, not coincidentally, somewhere in the territory this Center was built to cultivate. Magic happens here. Not all of it is written into the charter.

The anniversary deserves more than nostalgia, though.

We are living through a period of profound stress on democratic institutions — at home and in democracies around the world. Governments are cutting support for public media, universities, cultural institutions, and the arts. The assumption that an educated, humanistically literate citizenry is a public good worth investing in is no longer shared as widely as it once was. And into that vacuum comes something darker: the substitution of information for wisdom, of data for judgment, of engagement metrics for genuine understanding.

The humanities are not decoration. They are not a luxury for comfortable times. It is precisely in moments like this one — when regimes dehumanize and other our neighbors, when wars kill thousands and displace millions, when the language of belonging is weaponized rather than honored — that we discover how urgently we need what the humanities offer. History teaches us how power fails. Philosophy asks us what we owe each other. Literature reminds us that every policy has a human face.

My father understood this. He was a businessman, not an academic. But he saw clearly that a democracy unable to think historically and philosophically about itself was a democracy in trouble. His answer was to invest — substantially, strategically, and with a long time horizon — in the infrastructure of humanistic thought.

Which brings me to a direct appeal.

Philanthropic foundations have long supported the natural sciences, medicine, and technology. They fund laboratories and clinical trials and engineering breakthroughs. That work matters enormously. But the ratio of investment in humanistic scholarship to investment in technical fields has grown increasingly lopsided — and we are living with the consequences.

We have extraordinary tools and insufficient wisdom about how to use them. We have unprecedented access to information and a weakening capacity to interpret it with historical and ethical depth. We are building the future faster than we are asking whether we should, and for whom, and at what cost.

Foundations are unusually well positioned to address this — precisely because they are not dependent on electoral cycles or quarterly returns. They can take the long view. They can fund the kind of patient, rigorous humanistic scholarship that doesn’t produce a product or a patent but does, over time, produce citizens and leaders capable of governing well and thinking clearly about why it matters.

The Kluge Center is one model. There are others. What they share is a commitment to the proposition that thinking well about what it means to be human is not optional for a democracy.

Twenty-five years ago, my father made a bet on that proposition. It has paid off in ways that are documented in a thousand scholarly careers and dozens of landmark books — and in at least one marriage that might not have happened otherwise.

The bet is still worth making. The stakes are higher now. I hope more foundations will have the courage and the vision to make it.

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress was founded in 2000. Learn more at loc.gov/kluge.

For new readers: I’m John Kluge, co-founder of the Refugee Investment Network (RIN), a nonprofit that works to mobilize private capital for refugee entrepreneurs and the communities that host them. Over the past decade, RIN has helped develop what we call the Refugee Lens — a framework that defines and tracks investments based on how meaningfully they benefit displaced people, from refugee-owned businesses at the top tier to broader funds that finance the ecosystem. It has helped shift the conversation from refugees as a humanitarian burden to refugees as economic contributors and entrepreneurs. My wife Christine Mahoney and I explore this at length in our forthcoming book, Banking on Belonging (Columbia University Press, July 2026). This Substack ranges fairly widely — across regenerative business, impact investing, and what it means to build institutions worthy of human dignity — but the question of refugee belonging is close to the center of it all.

There’s a question I keep returning to as I look at the growing field of refugee lens investing: Are we doing enough?

The Refugee Investment Network’s Refugee Lens — our framework for categorizing and tracking private sector investments that benefit displaced people — has helped mobilize hundreds of millions of dollars. It gives investors a clear taxonomy, from R1 ventures that are refugee-owned to R6 funds that finance refugee-related enterprises across the ecosystem. It works. And yet.

When I sit with the framework honestly, I notice that it is primarily an economic instrument. It tracks ownership stakes, employment ratios, and capital flows. These things matter enormously. But they don’t fully capture what we’re actually after — which is not just refugee economic inclusion, but refugee belonging.

That distinction, small as it might sound, changes everything.

The Missing Dimension: Belonging Without Othering

John Powell at the Othering & Belonging Institute is one of America’s foremost thinkers on racial equity and structural inclusion, and his framework has profoundly shaped how I think about what impact investing is actually for. He has spent decades articulating something that resonates deeply with the work we do. He argues that true belonging is not the same as tolerance, or even inclusion. Belonging, in Powell’s framing, means that people are empowered to co-create the institutions, spaces, and decisions that shape their lives — free from the subtle (and not so subtle) divisions that mark some people as insiders and others as perpetual outsiders.

That second category — outsider — is what Powell calls “othering.” And if we’re honest, a great deal of refugee economic programming, even well-intentioned programming, risks replicating it. When refugees are treated as passive beneficiaries of jobs rather than active agents of enterprise. When their labor is sought but their leadership is not. When impact metrics count employment without asking whether workers have any meaningful voice.

The Refugee Lens, as it stands, doesn’t fully guard against this. An investment can qualify under R3 or R4 — refugee-supporting, or host-community-weighted — without generating a single degree of genuine belonging for the people it’s meant to serve.

I think we can do better.

Toward a Belonging-Infused Refugee Lens

Here’s what I’ve been working through: what would it look like to overlay Powell’s principles directly onto the existing R1–R6 framework? Not to replace it — the economic scaffolding is essential — but to deepen it.

First, add a belonging threshold. For investments to qualify at the top tiers (R1, refugee-owned; R2, refugee-led), they should demonstrate that refugees aren’t just holding equity — they’re holding power. Board seats. Participatory governance. Real decision-making authority. Belonging, Powell reminds us, means co-creation. An R1 business where the refugee founder is a nominal figurehead doesn’t clear that bar.

Second, measure bridging, not just output. Powell’s complementary concept is bridging — the active, intentional work of building connections across difference. In host countries where refugees and local communities are in competition for jobs, housing, and political goodwill, investments that only track economic outputs miss the relational dimension entirely. What if R3 and R4 investments were also evaluated on whether they generate joint training programs between refugees and hosts? Shared supply chains? Community dialogues that reduce tension and build trust? These aren’t soft metrics — they are predictive of whether an investment will generate durable social returns or simply displace conflict into a different register.

Third, require anti-othering due diligence. At the fund level (R5, R6), I’d propose what we might call “bridging audits” — an assessment of whether a fund’s portfolio actively challenges dehumanizing narratives or inadvertently reinforces them. Does the marketing frame refugees as innovators and partners, or as problems to be managed? Does the fund require anti-bias practices from its investees? These questions should sit alongside financial due diligence, not after it.

Finally, apply targeted universalism at scale. This is Powell’s elegant solution to the trap of one-size-fits-all programming: pursue universal goals — economic inclusion, community resilience — through targeted, context-specific strategies. For the Refugee Lens, this might mean designing R1 investments for high-density refugee areas in ways that explicitly generate benefits for host communities, so that belonging becomes a shared destination rather than a zero-sum contest.

Why This Matters Now

I think about the Shemal Start incubator I visited in Irbid, Jordan — Syrian refugees and Jordanians founding companies together, side by side, testing ideas, prototyping products, building and failing and learning in the same rooms. What made it work wasn’t just the programming. It was that the design forced daily contact, shared risk, and mutual dependence. You cannot spend weeks debugging a product with someone and still think of them as other. Belonging wasn’t a byproduct of Shemal Start; it was baked into the model.

That’s the kind of investment the world needs more of. And it’s the kind the current Refugee Lens, for all its strengths, doesn’t yet fully incentivize.

The good news is that the architecture is already there. RIN’s State of Refugee Lens Investing tool could track relational and belonging-oriented metrics alongside financial ones. Impact reports could include narrative analysis alongside employment figures. Fund mandates could require bridging as a condition, not an aspiration.

The shift I’m proposing is not a reinvention. It’s a deepening — from a lens that asks how much capital flows to refugees to one that asks whether that capital is building a world where refugees, and the communities that receive them, can truly belong.

That’s the question that keeps me in this work. I hope it keeps you here too.

John Kluge is the co-founder of the Refugee Investment Network and co-author (with Christine Mahoney) of Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone (Columbia University Press, July 2026).

Last December, the Trump administration did something genuinely surprising. Standing alongside Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Oz, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program — real funding, routed through existing NRCS conservation programs, designed to give American farmers a voluntary pathway off chemical dependency and toward soil health. Kennedy called it an “off-ramp.” He said the goal was to help farmers transition “to a model that emphasizes soil health, and with soil health comes nutrient density.” Rick Clark, a fifth-generation Indiana farmer who had already made the transition himself, called it “historic.”

Two months later, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to mandate the expanded domestic production of glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup, the subject of tens of thousands of cancer lawsuits, and the chemical that Secretary Kennedy spent years calling one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic. Kennedy’s response? He backed it immediately. “Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply.”

This isn’t a story about a policy disagreement. It’s a story about what happens when an announcement is made without the infrastructure to deliver it and what it means when the same administration that promises you an off-ramp simultaneously floors the accelerator on the highway you were supposed to be leaving.

Most Americans haven’t heard about the $700 million regenerative program, and the ones who have probably don’t know what happened to the agency that was supposed to run it. The Regenerative Pilot Program is administered by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (the NRCS) the agency closest to American farmers at the local level. It’s the one that helps farmers apply for conservation programs, conduct soil assessments, and build whole-farm plans. Without NRCS staff on the ground, the program is a press release.

Here’s what’s happened to that staff: NRCS has seen at least 2,400 employees take voluntary buyouts, and the agency’s workforce is on track to be cut from roughly 11,000 to 8,000 in 2026. The proposed USDA budget called for over $750 million in cuts to NRCS conservation technical assistance on top of those departures. Nearly two-thirds of all USDA staff departures have come from the agencies that work most directly with farmers — NRCS, FSA, and Rural Development. These are the people a farmer calls when they want to understand if they qualify for a program, what practices count, or how to submit an application. They’re leaving.

So the administration announced $700 million to help farmers transition away from chemicals, then gutted the workforce that would have made that transition possible, then signed an executive order mandating more of the very chemicals farmers were supposed to be transitioning away from. And the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who spent decades in environmental law arguing that glyphosate causes cancer, called it putting America first.

It’s worth pausing on Kennedy’s record here, because it’s not ancient history. He helped win a landmark $289 million verdict against Monsanto on behalf of a man whose cancer was linked to Roundup. As recently as 2024, while running for president, he said publicly that glyphosate “is one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic” and that his administration would ban its use as a wheat desiccant. His own MAHA Commission report, released in September 2025, cited concerns about pesticide links to adverse health outcomes in children. Last month, Bayer — which owns Monsanto — proposed a $7.25 billion settlement in ongoing Roundup cancer litigation.

None of that science changed this week. The only thing that changed is that the President signed an order and Kennedy supported it.

This matters beyond the politics, because the argument for glyphosate expansion is framed as protecting American farmers. That framing deserves to be challenged directly. True food security is not achieved by locking agriculture into permanent dependence on a single herbicide with billions of dollars in cancer liability attached to it. A supply chain built around one input, one company’s patent history, and one set of regulatory approvals is not resilience. It’s fragility wearing the costume of efficiency. The farmers I know who have transitioned to regenerative systems didn’t do it because it was easy. They did it because they understood that soil health is the actual foundation of long-term productivity — that you cannot keep extracting from land without restoring it, and that real food security starts with living soil, not with a chemical that suppresses everything growing in it.

What those farmers needed from their government was a credible commitment to the transition. They got a press conference in December and a contradictory executive order in February.

The regenerative pathway is not theoretical. Cover cropping, crop rotation, integrated pest management, reduced tillage, nutrient management — these are proven practices, not fringe ideas. Farmers who have adopted them describe real reductions in input costs over time, improved water retention during drought years, and long-term yield stability that chemical-dependent monocultures can’t match. The $700 million program, if properly staffed and funded, could have reached tens of thousands of producers in its first year alone. The first application window just closed on January 15th. Whether those applications will be processed by a workforce that’s been cut by 20% and counting is an open question nobody in the administration is answering.

What a genuine commitment to this transition would look like isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t easy. It starts with honest accounting—a full picture of glyphosate dependency that includes healthcare costs, litigation liability, the long-term soil degradation that forces ever-increasing chemical applications, and the growing market premium for chemical-free produce. It continues with properly staffed NRCS service centers that can actually help farmers apply, plan, and transition, not skeleton crews processing a backlog. It requires a published, predictable phase-down timeline that gives farmers and industry the certainty needed to invest in alternatives, the way Germany and France have approached partial restrictions. And it means federal procurement like school lunches, military food supply, beginning to reward regeneratively farmed goods—creating the market signal that makes the economics of transition work.

Instead, what American farmers got this week is an executive order that locks in the status quo and a Health Secretary who used to know better, publicly endorsing both.

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Secretary Kennedy, you were one of the most effective environmental attorneys in the country before you entered politics. You understood the science. You understood the human cost. You helped document it in courtrooms and commission reports and campaign speeches. The MAHA voters who helped deliver this administration trusted that you would bring that record with you into government — that the position would give you leverage, not the other way around.

What happened this week is not a defensible policy tradeoff. There is no version of “protecting American families” that involves the Secretary of Health and Human Services endorsing the expanded production of a chemical that his own commission flagged as a health concern, while the workforce tasked with helping farmers find an alternative is being systematically eliminated.

If you cannot use the platform you have to push back on decisions that contradict your stated life’s work — if the job has become a vehicle for lending credibility to outcomes you once fought against — then the most honest thing you can do for the farmers, families, and movement that trusted you is step aside.

The off-ramp you promised is still there. The question is whether there’s anyone left in government willing to build it.

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Sources: USDA NRCS Regenerative Pilot Program announcement, December 10, 2025; Regenerative Food Systems Investment analysis, January 2026; AgWeb NRCS staffing analysis; CNBC reporting on Kennedy’s glyphosate statement, February 2026; Truthout, The Hill, Fox News, and New York Times coverage of the executive order; Jezebel reporting on Kennedy’s prior statements.

It’s the question everyone in the humanitarian sector is asking right now. The January 2025 dismantling of USAID — a 97% workforce reduction, 92% of contracts terminated — sent shockwaves through the development community. Catholic Relief Services lost funding for eleven of thirteen international food aid programs. The International Rescue Committee laid off thousands. The Norwegian Refugee Council halted aid to 1.5 million people in twenty countries.

So will it come back?

My answer surprised him: Yes, probably. But not in a way that solves the displacement crisis. And that’s actually good news.

Let me explain.

The Pattern You’re Missing

US foreign aid has never been primarily about humanitarian compassion. It’s been about strategic competition.

Look at the history:

1948-1952: The Marshall Plan pumped $13 billion into Europe (equivalent to $173 billion today). Why? Not just generosity — strategic necessity. We needed stable democracies to counter Soviet expansion.

1950s-1980s: Aid tracked Cold War competition. Countries got US dollars if they aligned against the USSR. When Soviet influence receded in a region, so did our aid budget.

2001-2021: Aid spiked again during the War on Terror. Afghanistan received $146 billion over twenty years — not because of humanitarian need but because we had troops on the ground and a counterinsurgency strategy to fund.

2021-2024: The moment we withdrew from Afghanistan, development aid started declining. No troops, no strategic rationale, no budget.

The pattern is clear: Aid follows geopolitical competition, not simply humanitarian need.

When the US has a clear adversary to counter, aid becomes a tool of statecraft. When we don’t, it gets cut.

So What Brings It Back?

China.

Not because Congress suddenly remembers the 123 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Because China is building influence through Belt and Road infrastructure projects across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — and we can’t afford to cede those relationships.

But here’s what most people in the humanitarian sector are missing: When aid comes back, it won’t look like the old USAID.

China’s competitive advantage isn’t humanitarian relief. It’s investment and infrastructure. If the US responds (and we will, eventually), it will be through the Development Finance Corporation — loans, equity investments, guarantees — not grants to refugee camps.

We’ll see three possible scenarios play out:

Scenario 1: Transactional Development Finance (Most Likely — 2027-2030)

DFC gets expanded authority and budget. The US starts competing with China by financing infrastructure, energy projects, and private sector development in countries where we need influence.

What returns: Investment in strategic countries.

What doesn’t return: USAID’s humanitarian relief budgets, refugee resettlement programs, or long-term camp assistance.

Scenario 2: Strategic Humanitarian Aid (Possible — 2028-2032)

A major crisis — climate disaster, pandemic, or migration flow that directly threatens US interests — forces renewed engagement. We rebuild targeted humanitarian programs tied to specific geographic priorities: Central America (to manage migration), Middle East (to prevent instability), maybe parts of Africa if China’s influence there becomes threatening.

What returns: Narrow, transactional humanitarian programs.

What doesn’t return: Universal commitments or the broad refugee resettlement apparatus. I do hope I’m wrong on this one.

Scenario 3: New Internationalist Coalition (Least Likely — 2030+)

A major political realignment brings back something like USAID, rebuilt under a different mandate focused on climate resilience, pandemic prevention, and migration management.

What this would mean: Even in this best-case scenario, budgets won’t return to 2020 levels. And the new paradigm will emphasize economic integration and self-reliance over dependency — because the old camp-based model demonstrably failed.

Here’s Why This Actually Matters Less Than You Think

In all three scenarios, the fundamental reality doesn’t change:

123 million people are displaced. Aid at its peak couldn’t serve them all.

Even when USAID was fully funded in 2022, humanitarian need exceeded available resources by 200%. The average displaced person lived in limbo for 20 years. Resettlement numbers were declining. The system was failing before it was dismantled.

The 2025 collapse didn’t create the crisis. It made visible what was already true: the humanitarian aid model cannot scale to meet global displacement.

So whether aid comes back or not, we need a different system.

The System That Works Whether Aid Returns or Not

This is where my answer to the NGO executive got interesting.

I told him: “Stop asking whether aid will return. Start asking what works in the absence of aid — because that’s the system we should be building either way.”

What works is economic integration through a blend of public and private capital.

Let me give you the data:

Uganda’s Opportunity Bank received a $9 million facility from the US Development Finance Corporation to lend to refugees and host community members. Results: 18,000 loans, 60,000 small enterprises created, 96.6% repayment rate. Not charity. Investment with real returns.

Kiva’s Refugee Investment Fund deployed $40.7 million to 51,400 refugee borrowers globally. Repayment rate: 96.6% — matching non-refugee borrowers. Turns out refugees are excellent credit risks when given the chance.

The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive granted 4.3 million Ukrainian refugees immediate right to work. Result: 25,000 businesses created in Poland alone in the first year. Ukrainian entrepreneurs filling labor shortages, paying taxes, contributing to growth.

This isn’t theory. It’s happening right now, at scale, generating returns.

Why This Approach Survives Any Scenario

If aid stays dead (Scenario 1): Private capital is the only game in town. What is called “refugee lens investing” becomes essential infrastructure.

If aid returns strategically (Scenario 2): Private capital complements limited government resources. Together they create sustainable solutions.

If aid fully returns (Scenario 3): Even the new aid paradigm emphasizes economic integration and livelihoods — exactly what refugee lens investing provides.

In other words: There is in fact hope, no matter the scenario.

The question isn’t whether to build this system. The question is how fast we can scale it.

What the Humanitarian Sector Gets Wrong

Most NGO executives I talk to are still operating in the old paradigm. They’re lobbying for aid restoration, hoping a new administration brings back USAID, writing op-eds about American moral leadership.

That’s an important fight, but it’s also the wrong fight.

Here’s what they should be doing instead:

1. Retool for investment and blended capital, not grants.

Your field relationships, your trust with displaced communities, your on-the-ground presence — these are assets that can source deal flow, provide technical assistance, and de-risk private investment. But only if you stop thinking like aid distributors and start thinking like investment intermediaries.

2. Partner with DFIs, not just donors.

The US Development Finance Corporation, European Investment Bank, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Japan’s JICA — these institutions have $100+ billion in deployment capacity and mandates to invest in emerging markets. They need pipeline. You have it. Build the bridge.

3. Measure what investors care about.

Stop reporting on “people served.” Start reporting on businesses created, jobs generated, loan repayment rates, tax revenue contributed. The average investor doesn’t care about your inputs. They care about outcomes and returns.

4. Accept that displaced people are contributors, not just vulnerable people.

Refugees have a 13% entrepreneurship rate in the US versus 9% for native-born Americans. They paid $25 billion in taxes in 2019. They launch businesses at higher rates because they’ve already demonstrated extreme resilience and in many cases often have no other choice. And while not everyone can be or should be an entrepreneur, most people, regardless of where they come from or what their background is, wants to live a life of dignity and contribution. But for the world’s displaced, too often that’s an option because other people limit their potential by perpetuating narratives of need or fear.

If you’re still framing them as vulnerable populations in need of help, you may be part of the problem.

The Answer I Gave

So here’s what I told the NGO executive this morning:

“US foreign aid will probably come back in some form — smaller, more strategic, more focused on investment than grants. But it doesn’t matter. Because even at peak funding, aid couldn’t solve this problem. You’re asking the wrong question.

The right question is: How do we build a system where 123 million displaced people aren’t waiting for governments to act? Where they’re accessing capital, building businesses, creating jobs, and integrating into economies as contributors, not forced into cycles of aid dependency?

That system is refugee lens investing. And it works whether USAID exists or not.”

He paused. Then: “So what do we do?”

“Stop focusing on lobbying Congress. Start calling investors.”

What Happens Next

I’m not naive. I know the political fight for aid restoration must continue. Faith communities, advocacy groups, and parts of the development sector will push to rebuild USAID or something like it.

Good.

But while they’re focused on Washington, the rest of us should be focused on what can work now: deploying private capital to create economic opportunity for displaced people.

Because here’s the thing about displacement that most people still don’t understand:

Displacement is not a temporary emergency. It’s a permanent feature of the 21st century.

Climate change is accelerating. Conflict is rising. 123 million displaced people may become 200 million by 2030. Humanitarian aid — even if it comes back — will never scale to meet that need.

But capital markets can.

Global impact investing is a $1 trillion+ market. If even 1% of that capital deployed through a refugee lens, we’d have $10 billion in annual investment — more than USAID’s entire refugee budget at its peak and more than would be needed to fill UN Refugee Agency’s funding gap (last year’s gap was around $6.68 billion).

That’s not a fantasy. That’s math. And the infrastructure to make it happen is being built right now.

The System We’re Building

My co-author Christine Mahoney and I have spent the last decade documenting what refugee lens investing looks like in practice — from Uganda to Jordan, Mexico to Poland, New York to North Dakota.

Through our work with the Refugee Investment Network, we’ve identified six categories of investment (R1-R6), built due diligence frameworks, measured outcomes, and shown that this approach generates competitive returns while creating durable economic integration.

Our book, Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone publishes in July 2026. It’s the first comprehensive guide to refugee lens investing — the framework, the evidence, the playbook for practitioners.

But the book is just documentation of what’s already happening. The real work is scaling the system.

So Will Aid Come Back?

Yeah, probably. In some form. Eventually.

But here’s what I know for certain: 123 million people can’t wait to find out.

They need economic opportunity now. They need access to capital now. They need pathways to self-sufficiency now.

Refugee lens investing provides all three — whether governments are engaged or not, whether aid returns or not, whether the political winds shift or not.

That’s the system we’re building. And if you’re still waiting for USAID to save you, you’re already five years behind.

Last night, as millions tuned into Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, Bad Bunny didn’t just perform—he made history. The Puerto Rican superstar delivered the first-ever halftime show entirely in Spanish, transforming the world’s biggest sporting stage into a vibrant celebration of Latino heritage and Puerto Rican pride. Joined by icons like Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny’s set was a high-energy explosion of reggaeton rhythms, cultural nods, and unapologetic joy, from hits like “Baile Inolvidable” and “DTMF” to dancers channeling the island’s rich history. Wearing a cream Zara jersey emblazoned with “OCASIO” (his family name) and the number 64—speculated to honor his mother’s birth year—he spiked a football in triumph, symbolizing a cultural touchdown for Latinos everywhere.

This wasn’t just entertainment; it was a powerful statement on belonging. In a nation built by immigrants, Bad Bunny’s performance—outspoken as he is on U.S. immigration policies—reminded us that cultural contributions from newcomers enrich the American tapestry. But belonging isn’t just about culture; it’s economic too. What I call “economies of belonging” recognize that when we invest in immigrants and refugees, fostering their integration and success, the benefits ripple out to everyone—reducing divides, boosting growth, and even balancing budgets.

Enter a timely new study from the Cato Institute, released just days ago, that shatters myths about immigrants as fiscal burdens. Titled “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023,” the report analyzes three decades of federal, state, and local data to show that immigrants—legal and undocumented alike—have been a net positive for America’s finances every single year since 1994. Far from “sucking us dry,” as some politicians have claimed, immigrants reduced the U.S. deficit by a staggering $14.5 trillion over that period. Without them, the deficit would have ballooned to $48 trillion, meaning they’ve cut it by nearly a third in real terms.

How? Immigrants pay more in taxes than the average person, thanks to sky-high employment rates that offset lower wages, leading to higher per capita incomes and tax contributions. They account for 14% of tax revenue but only 7% of government spending. Even if we somehow collected their taxes without spending a dime on them, the deficit would still be $20 trillion—proving immigrants aren’t causing our fiscal woes; they’re alleviating them. Public debt would exceed 200% of GDP without their contributions, a level that could spark a crisis.

On the spending side, immigrants cost less across the board. They save billions on education because they arrive as adults (average age 25), sparing the U.S. the expense of their schooling while still contributing as workers. Old-age benefits are lower too—many are ineligible for Social Security or Medicare due to status or late arrival. And despite higher poverty rates, they use welfare at average levels, largely because undocumented immigrants are barred from most programs. Even low-skilled immigrants without bachelor’s degrees reduced debt by $2.8 trillion, and undocumented ones by at least $1.7 trillion. Including second-generation kids—who are poised to become taxpayers—the total debt reduction hits $7.9 trillion.

This isn’t projection or snapshot; it’s hard data over 30 years, building on models from the National Academies of Sciences. It debunks nativist fears: Immigrants subsidize the government, helping cover fixed costs like military spending and debt interest that don’t rise with population. As the study notes, the average person is fiscally positive in this system—and immigrants outperform the average.

Bad Bunny’s show and the Cato findings converge on a truth: Immigrants don’t just belong; they elevate us. His performance highlighted cultural vitality, while the study quantifies economic strength. This is the essence of economies of belonging—systems where inclusion drives prosperity for all.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce my forthcoming book, Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone, co-authored with Christine Mahoney and published by Columbia University Press. Drawing from years of research and real-world examples, we make the case for targeted investments in refugee-led businesses. Refugees aren’t just survivors; they’re innovators. When we provide access to capital, training, and networks, they create jobs, spur innovation, and build resilient communities. Our book offers a roadmap for policymakers, investors, and philanthropists to harness this potential, showing how such investments yield outsized returns—not just financially, but in fostering social cohesion and economic growth.

Think about it: Refugees often arrive with entrepreneurial grit forged in adversity. In the U.S., they start businesses at higher rates than natives, revitalizing neighborhoods and economies. Yet barriers like credit access hold them back. By “banking on belonging,” we unlock their talents, turning potential fiscal contributors into engines of wealth. The Cato study proves immigrants already reduce deficits; imagine the impact if we supercharged refugee entrepreneurship.

In a polarized time, economies of belonging offer a unifying path. Bad Bunny’s halftime triumph wasn’t just a party—it was a reminder of what America gains from openness. Paired with data-driven insights like Cato’s, and actionable strategies from books like mine, we can build a future where immigration isn’t a wedge issue but a shared strength. Let’s invest in belonging; the returns will benefit everyone.

Bibliography

•  Acevedo, Yoselín. “Review: Bad Bunny brought Puerto Rico’s history and culture to a revolutionary Super Bowl show.” AP News, February 9, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/bad-bunny-super-bowl-2026-halftime-show-review-fbcd3dff50a4c6b0548bfa4712677eb0

•  Bier, David J., Michael Howard, and Julián Salazar. Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023. White Paper. Cato Institute, February 3, 2026. https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023

•  Kluge, John, and Christine Mahoney. Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone. Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2026.

•  Pareles, Jon. “Bad Bunny’s Halftime History Lesson.” The New York Times, February 9, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/arts/music/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-review.html

•  Ramos, Liam. “Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance redefined what it means to be an American patriot.” CNN, February 9, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/09/entertainment/bad-bunny-america-super-bowl-liam-ramos

•  Ruggieri, Melissa. “Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show brings powerful message, celebrities to world stage.” USA Today, February 9, 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/02/08/bad-bunny-super-bowl-performance/88204912007

The largest single-day protest in U.S. history wasn’t a Soros-funded flop, as MAGA X posts claim with wild turnout lies (“2% showed up!”). It was a constitutional cry against a presidency that’s racked up over 60 documented power grabs since January 2025, shredding the guardrails of democracy. Let’s walk through why millions felt compelled to march, while MAGA’s echo chamber spins clownish conspiracies.

The executive branch is now a loyalty machine, not a public trust. Trump fired 17 inspectors general in his first week, no congressional notice, installing yes-men to dodge scrutiny. Ethics offices? Gutted. Lobbyist gift bans? Gone. “Schedule F” is back, axing 10,000 federal workers for disloyalty, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief for an unflattering jobs report. MAGA calls this “draining the swamp”; it’s a king stacking his court, crushing accountability.

The judiciary—meant to check power—is treated like a pesky vassal. Over 160 court orders defied by July, from federal grants to deportations to habeas corpus, even Supreme Court rulings. Trump attacks judges, files baseless complaints, demands impeachments, and his allies float court budget cuts. MAGA spins it as “fighting activists,” but it’s a middle finger to the rule of law, acting like the president’s word trumps all.

Congress, the people’s voice, is a doormat. Trump froze all federal spending day one, violating the Impoundment Control Act, then siphoned billions from EV programs, refugee aid, and Head Start for his border obsession—no vote needed. Tariffs via emergency powers, “pocket veto” threats, an $11 billion blue-state fund freeze during the shutdown? It’s robbing Congress’s constitutional purse, yet MAGA X posts call the rallies “anti-democracy” for daring to notice.

Free speech? Only for loyalists. The Associated Press is banned from the White House; networks face “defamation” suits; NPR and PBS get FCC probes and funding cuts, shuttering stations. “Enemy of the people” rhetoric fuels threats, tanking our press freedom score. MAGA’s take? Protesters are “terrorists” in clown costumes, not citizens using their First Amendment rights.

Civil society’s under siege: 32 probes on nonprofits, loan forgiveness yanked for “illegal” advocacy, universities like Harvard defunded over DEI, students deported for protesting. Law firms lose clearances for anti-Trump cases; Los Angeles saw Marines and Guard with smoke grenades at rallies. Yesterday’s peaceful 100,000-strong NYC march faced “heavy force” threats, yet MAGA ties it to “Antifa invasions.” Delusional.

Elections are gasping: January 6 pardons, 2020 fraud lies, third-term teases, voter purges via citizenship rules, dropped DOJ voting rights cases, federal election takeover pushes. It’s entrenchment, not security, but MAGA insists it’s “the people’s will”—ignoring the 7 million who marched.

Immigration’s a due-process slaughter: 1798 Alien Enemies Act for no-hearing deportations, birthright citizenship attacks, visa yanks for scholars’ speech, student detentions at protests. It’s executive whim as law—purely kingly.

Services are collateral damage: DEI bans, NIH cuts, 20% FEMA slash, climate fund axing, the “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting healthcare and aid, Education Department abolition, book bans in DoD schools. It’s ideology from on high, not governance.

States get trampled: Sanctuary fund threats, energy lawsuits, California’s Guard hijacked, DOJ intimidation letters, D.C. police takeover, surveillance bloat, Musk’s unelected “efficiency” squad slashing at will. Federalism’s a joke.

Scholars warn we’re sliding toward autocracy; Freedom House scores plummet. Over 60 actions, cataloged by watchdogs, fuel this fear. Yet MAGA’s in a parallel universe—poop-jet memes, “hate rally” smears, turnout denial. That AI video isn’t funny; it’s a confession of kingly arrogance.

I’m no saint, just someone who sees the Constitution as our North Star. The “No Kings” marchers—veterans, families, Democrats like Sanders, nonpartisans alike—aren’t hating America; they’re saving it, peacefully, massively. MAGA’s absurd denial, cheering a leader who treats the Constitution like a prop, is the real betrayal. The founders fought for a republic, not this sideshow. Wake up, or history will mark you as the courtiers who let democracy become a punchline.

Let’s start with why this matters. Nature isn’t just nice to have; it’s a cornerstone of our wellbeing. Research shows that 120 minutes a week in green spaces boosts health, cuts stress, and lowers the risk of mental health disorders. It sharpens our focus, lowers blood pressure, and sparks physical activity, while easing anxiety and depression. A review of over 800 studies found that simple acts—mindful walks, listening to birdsong, or sitting under trees—lift our mood and inspire us to protect the environment. For those of us juggling the grind of modern life, urban parks and green roofs can restore mental clarity, offering a lifeline to resilience and joy.

But nature does more than soothe—it speaks to our soul. Time outdoors stirs awe, connection, and a sense of purpose that no app or office can replicate. Studies show it reduces isolation, boosts mindfulness, and even strengthens our immune systems. In the wild, we find meaning, creativity, and a reminder that we’re part of something bigger. This spiritual lift isn’t just feel-good fluff; it’s a spark for innovation and hope, critical in a world that often feels fragmented.

Our survival hinges on this bond. Disconnection fuels the ecological crisis—less nature in our lives means less care for the planet. Since the 1950s, urban sprawl has widened this gap, correlating with worse health outcomes and a collective amnesia about our reliance on ecosystems for food, air, and water. Richardson nails it: low nature connectedness is a root cause of environmental destruction. If we don’t feel nature, we won’t fight for it. And without that fight, we risk everything.

So, what is nature connectedness? It’s not just hiking on weekends—it’s feeling nature as part of who you are. It’s the emotional and mental tie that makes you pause at a sunset, plant a garden, or advocate for cleaner rivers. It’s about seeing yourself in the ecosystem, not apart from it, and letting that spark action. This mindset shift is what turns apathy into stewardship.

Here’s the exciting part: we can rebuild this connection, and it’s not as hard as you think. Start with small, intentional steps—smell a flower, walk barefoot on grass, or sketch a tree. These sensory moments boost wellbeing and deepen your bond. Make it a habit: journal about nature, meditate in a park, or join a community garden. Research shows these activities, especially when they engage your emotions, significantly increase connectedness. For lasting impact, get kids involved—forest schools and family nature outings pass this love down, breaking the cycle of urban isolation. On a bigger scale, push for policies that transform cities with green spaces, renewable energy, and nature-focused education. If we act now, this shift could become self-sustaining in 25 years.

Entrepreneurs and business leaders, you have a unique role here. I’ve seen how innovative businesses can drive change, and this is your moment. Embed nature into your company’s DNA—think biophilic offices with living walls, team retreats in green spaces, or “nature champions” who organize daily outdoor micro-breaks. Make nature-positive goals a core strategy: measure your team’s nature connectedness, partner with conservation groups, and choose suppliers who prioritize biodiversity. These moves don’t just help the planet—they boost creativity, reduce burnout, and attract talent who want purpose-driven workplaces. By modeling this shift, you’ll inspire customers and competitors alike, proving that profitability and planetary health go hand in hand.

There’s a spark of hope: Richardson notes that nature words are creeping back into books, down from a 60.6% decline in 1990 to 52.4% today. Is this a cultural shift, a nod to eco-awareness, or a deeper spiritual pull? Whatever it is, let’s seize it. We’ve drifted too far, but we can choose to return—to nature, to ourselves, to a future where both thrive. As I’ve learned from championing impact-driven causes, change starts with bold vision and practical steps. So, step outside today, feel the earth, and let’s build a world where we remember that we’re part of nature too.

#nature #environmentalpolicy #noplanetb #pachamama

Bibliography/Sources

1. The Guardian. (2025). “Human connection to nature has declined 60% in 200 years, study finds.” Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/09/human-connection-to-nature-has-declined-60-in-200-years-study-finds

2. The Nature of Americans National Report. (2018). “Key Findings.” Available at: https://natureofamericans.org/key-findings

3. Bratman, G. N., et al. (2019). “Nature and mental health: An ecosystem service perspective.” Science Advances. Available at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax0903

4. Keniger, L. E., et al. (2013). “What are the benefits of interacting with nature?” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/10/3/913

5. Lumber, R., et al. (2017). “Beyond knowing nature: Contact, emotion, compassion, meaning, and beauty are pathways to nature connection.” PLOS ONE. Available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177186

6. Richardson, M., et al. (2020). “Moments, not minutes: The nature-wellbeing relationship.” International Journal of Wellbeing. Available at: https://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ijow/article/view/1267

7. Sheffield, D., & Butler, C. (2020). “Nature connectedness and employee well-being.” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Available at: https://journals.lww.com/joem/Abstract/2020/09000/Nature_Connectedness_and_Employee_Well_Being.7.aspx

8. Martin, L., et al. (2020). “Nature contact, nature connectedness and associations with health, wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviours.” Journal of Environmental Psychology. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494419307062

9. Twohig-Bennett, C., & Jones, A. (2018). “The health benefits of the great outdoors: A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace exposure and health outcomes.” Environmental Research. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935118303323

The E.U.'s roadmap is groundbreaking in its structure and scope. Released on July 7, 2025, it outlines a phased approach to establishing a voluntary market for nature credits, where actions like restoring wetlands, expanding forests, or enhancing soil health generate certified units that businesses can purchase to offset their environmental impacts. From 2025 to 2026, the Commission will conduct market assessments and launch pilot projects funded by the E.U., ensuring transparency and integrity to avoid greenwashing. By 2027, E.U.-wide certification rules will be in place, harmonizing standards across member states. Complementing this, the E.U. has pledged to dedicate 10% of its budget to biodiversity by 2026-2027 and double external spending to €7 billion, fostering public-private partnerships that could scale investments exponentially. This isn't altruism; it's recognition that nature's services—like pollination, water purification, and carbon sequestration—underpin over half of global GDP, valued at $44 trillion. By putting nature "on the balance sheet," as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasized, the E.U. is creating incentives for private sector innovation while rewarding farmers, foresters, and landowners for their stewardship.

Contrast this with the U.S., where biodiversity funding falls woefully short, exacerbating a domestic financing gap that hampers economic growth and heightens vulnerability to climate shocks. Reports highlight that insufficient investment in nature could undermine key sectors, from agriculture (where bee declines cost farmers billions) to tourism (where habitat loss erodes coastal economies). While promising steps exist—such as Qarlbo Biodiversity's pioneering sale of voluntary biodiversity credits in May 2025 and events like the Natural Capital Investment Americas conference—these are fragmented and lack national coordination. The U.S. Treasury's recent support for high-integrity voluntary carbon markets signals openness to market-based solutions, but without a dedicated nature credits framework, we're missing opportunities to bridge our portion of the $700-900 billion global shortfall. Adopting an E.U.-style system could integrate with existing tools like the Inflation Reduction Act, channeling funds into restoration projects that create jobs in rural communities and bolster supply chain resilience.

The benefits for the U.S. would be multifaceted and profound. Economically, nature credits would unlock private investment, turning biodiversity from a liability into an asset class that attracts capital and drives innovation in sustainable technologies. Companies adopting nature-positive strategies could enjoy higher investor confidence, reduced risks from ecosystem collapse, and enhanced reputations—benefits already touted in E.U. projections for market growth through 2030. Environmentally, it would accelerate restoration efforts, such as rewilding prairies in the Great Plains or protecting wetlands along the Gulf Coast, mitigating floods and droughts that cost the U.S. billions yearly. Socially, it would empower American heroes: the farmers implementing regenerative practices, indigenous communities safeguarding lands, and conservationists preserving habitats, providing them with tangible economic rewards rather than mere recognition. Moreover, by fostering public-private partnerships, it could generate new jobs in green sectors, from monitoring ecosystems to developing certification tech, while addressing inequities in environmental burdens.

Critics might argue that nature credits risk commodifying the environment or enabling greenwashing, as seen in some carbon market pitfalls. Yet the E.U.'s emphasis on robust certification, additionality, and durability—ensuring credits represent real, verifiable gains—provides safeguards that the U.S. could adapt and improve upon. With bipartisan interest in rural economies and national security (healthy ecosystems buffer against resource scarcity), this isn't a partisan issue—it's a pragmatic one.

The E.U. has lit the path; now the U.S. must seize the moment. Congress and the Trump administration—or future administrations—should prioritize developing a national nature credits roadmap, starting with pilot programs in biodiversity hotspots like the Everglades or Appalachian forests. By doing so, we can reclaim global leadership in sustainability, safeguard our prosperity, and ensure a thriving planet for future generations. As von der Leyen aptly put it: "We have to put nature on the balance sheet. That’s exactly what nature credits do." America, let's make it our balance sheet too.

Years ago, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I delved into J.R.R. Tolkien's worlds under the guidance of the late professor Karl Kroeber, whose explorations of fantasy and ecology illuminated how literature critiques human hubris. Now, amid gathering political storms—from AI ethics battles to surveillance scandals and the Trump administration's aggressive rollback of environmental protections—I find myself returning to Tolkien's tales, discovering in them a stark caution for our digital age. In Middle-earth, the palantíri—ancient seeing-stones meant for distant communication—become snares of illusion and domination. Saruman, the fallen wizard, is ensnared by Sauron's gaze through one; Denethor spirals into despair from obsessive monitoring. These artifacts, Tolkien warned, twist knowledge into control, isolating users and eroding free will. Today, Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies, named after those very stones, has surged past $150 in recent weeks, closing at $148.42 on July 22 amid market volatility, on track for record revenue with Q1 alone hitting $884 million, up 39% year-over-year. Its AI platforms, used for intelligence analytics, migrant tracking by ICE, and homeland security data fusion, mirror Tolkien's parable: tools of insight repurposed for surveillance, risking a society where privacy dissolves and power concentrates. Under the Trump administration, these tools expand amid policies that open public lands for drilling, weaken endangered species protections, and block offshore wind energy—using data-driven oversight to enable the very industrial ravages Tolkien decried.

Tolkien, a World War I veteran haunted by mechanized warfare, harbored a deep distrust of modernity's "mind of metal and wheels." In his letters, he decried labor-saving machines as breeders of "new and horrible evil," likening them to the atomic bomb's madness—a symptom of humanity's overreach (Letters 75, 102). His stories aren't escapist fantasy but ecological and moral fables, where industrialization scars the land and corrupts the soul. Palantir's growth, fueled by contracts that integrate vast datasets for predictive policing and military ops, embodies this: a digital Isengard, where algorithms uproot human agency much like Saruman's factories despoil the Shire. This rings truer in 2025, as Trump's Project 2025-aligned policies—launching over 100 attacks on environmental safeguards in the first 100 days, increasing U.S. timber production by 25%, and repealing climate-focused executive orders—accelerate habitat destruction, worsen pollution, and undermine wildlife protections, potentially leveraging Palantir's tech to monitor opposition or streamline extraction permits.

At the core is a philosophical rift. Thiel, Palantir's co-founder, channels Ayn Rand's objectivism—a creed of radical self-interest, where entrepreneurs are heroic innovators unbound by collective ties. Rand's atheism and exaltation of the individual contrast sharply with Tolkien's humanism, rooted in communal bonds and humility. His hobbits prevail through fellowship and simple virtues, not technological supremacy or ego-driven ambition. Thiel's pivot to national conservatism, bolstering Palantir's "defense moat" with government partnerships, evokes Saruman's betrayal: wisdom allied with machinery, birthing unintended tyrannies. Thiel's support for Trump amplifies this, as administration policies favor deregulation that harms the natural world—e.g., ending offshore wind projects, easing pipeline safety, and changing endangered species rules to allow economic assessments over ecological needs—prioritizing profit over the stewardship Tolkien saw as essential to human dignity.

As Palantir expands in 2025, Tolkien's wisdom urges us to question tech's unchecked ascent. His tales remind us that power, even data-wrapped, corrupts—fostering division over connection, paranoia over trust. In the face of Trump's environmental assaults, which experts warn could decelerate global decarbonization, endanger species, and drive up long-term energy costs, we must heed this: technology like Palantir shouldn't enable the plunder of our planet. In an era of digital shadows, we might shatter these modern palantíri by demanding ethical AI governance, robust privacy laws, and a return to human-scale communities that protect both people and the earth. As Tolkien might toast, may the hobbits "outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees." For in rejecting the dominion of Palantir and the despoiling of our world, we honor Tolkien's truth: true power lies not in surveillance or exploitation, but in the humble bonds that sustain both humanity and the earth.

Bibliography

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Tolkien, J.R.R. (1981). The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (H. Carpenter, Ed.). Houghton Mifflin. (Original work published 1981). [Specific references: Letter 75 (1944) and Letter 102 (1945), discussing technology and modernity]. https://bibliothecaveneficae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOooJmG6VDt2vO1ge0vxzIS0HkO2AQ8odkYmeAuOAvNokj7Ye-wOI

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Yahoo Finance. (2025). Missed Palantir’s huge 100% run in 2025? These stocks could be… Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/missed-palantirs-huge-100-run-100000477.html

In the shadow of renewed political turbulence, Columbia University has struck a Faustian bargain with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay over $200 million and implement sweeping changes to resolve probes into its handling of pro-Palestinian protests. This settlement, which restores most suspended federal funds but at the cost of academic concessions, raises profound questions about institutional independence. As a speculative exercise, one might ask: What would Alexander Hamilton, the fiery defender of King's College (Columbia's predecessor) during the Revolutionary era, think of this modern drama? Drawing from his life and writings, Hamilton would likely decry Columbia's response as a lamentable surrender that prioritizes financial security over the sacred principles of academic freedom and orderly dissent—principles he risked his life to uphold.

Hamilton's own history with Columbia's forerunner provides a striking parallel. In 1775, as a student at King's College, the young Hamilton confronted a revolutionary mob intent on tar-and-feathering the institution's Loyalist president, Myles Cooper. Despite his own patriot sympathies, Hamilton delayed the crowd with an impassioned speech, allowing Cooper to escape. This act wasn't mere loyalty to a mentor but a stand against mob rule threatening intellectual discourse.

In today's context, Hamilton might view the Trump administration's financial penalties—imposed for Columbia's alleged laxity in addressing antisemitism amid Gaza-related protests—as a governmental "mob" wielding federal funds as a weapon. By suspending $400 million in grants and demanding reforms like adopting a definition of antisemitism that equates it with anti-Zionism, eliminating DEI programs, and enforcing "viewpoint diversity" in Middle Eastern studies, the administration echoes the coercive tactics Hamilton abhorred.

He would argue that such interference erodes the university's claimed preservation of "autonomy and authority over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making," turning academia into a battleground for partisan agendas.

Yet Hamilton was no champion of unbridled chaos. A pragmatist who valued stability, he warned in Federalist No. 9 of the "tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage" that could engulf republics if left unchecked.

The Columbia protests, marked by building occupations and disruptions, might remind him of the anarchic forces he detested during the Revolution. He could fault the university's initial response as overly permissive, inviting federal meddling by failing to swiftly "discipline student offenders for severe disruptions of campus operations," as the settlement now mandates. Later in life, Hamilton's support for the Alien and Sedition Acts—laws curbing seditious speech amid fears of French influence—reveals his willingness to prioritize order over absolute free expression when national unity seemed at stake.

In this light, he might reluctantly endorse measures to curb extremism on campus, viewing pro-Palestinian activism's more radical elements as akin to the "party rage" he sought to temper.

Hamilton's vision for education further illuminates his potential critique. He proposed a national university to foster shared "principles, opinions, and manners" among Americans, aiming to unify a diverse nation through enlightened learning.

While he might approve of ending "race preferences" in admissions as aligning with his meritocratic ideals—favoring talent over inherited privilege—he would likely condemn the broader politicization of curricula and hiring. Forcing "structural changes" to the Faculty Senate or scrutiny of international admissions smacks of overreach that stifles the free inquiry Hamilton prized. As an elitist who rose from humble origins, he believed education should elevate the capable, not bend to executive whims.

Ultimately, Hamilton would probably fault Columbia for acquiescing rather than resisting. Echoing his bold advocacy in the Federalist Papers, he might urge the university to mount a legal and public defense of its independence, warning that such weakness invites further encroachments. In Federalist No. 84, he argued against a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, believing existing safeguards sufficient, but emphasized vigilance against power abuses: "The most considerable of these remaining objections is that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights."

Today, he might see Columbia's payout and concessions—derided by protesters as "selling your students out"—as a bribe that undermines those safeguards, allowing federal leverage to erode liberty.

In an era of polarized campuses and governmental arm-twisting, Hamilton's legacy reminds us that true academic freedom demands courage. Columbia's settlement may restore funds, but at what cost to its soul? As Hamilton knew, yielding to pressure today risks greater tyranny tomorrow.

Bibliography

1. Federalist No 84 - The Avalon Project. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed84.asp

2. Alexander Hamilton | The First Amendment Encyclopedia. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/alexander-hamilton/

3. To Alexander Hamilton from George Washington, 1 September 1796. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-20-02-0199

4. 'Alexander Hamilton' - The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/books/chapters/alexander-hamilton.html

5. Alexander Hamilton - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton

6. The Federalist Papers No. 9 - The Avalon Project. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed09.asp

The electoral upheavals of 2024 weren't anomalies; they stemmed from deep-seated grievances. In the U.S., for instance, the wealth gap has expanded dramatically, with the top 1% holding more than the middle class combined, while wages for the bottom 50% remain stagnant. This is now highly likely to be further exacerbated by the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasted will lead to the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy in a single law in U.S. history. Similar patterns echo globally, amplified by a post-pandemic recovery that disproportionately benefited the elite. This context has intensified calls for economic equity, prompting a surge in impact strategies focused on the working class.

With over $1.5 trillion in assets under management, impact investing is directing funds into ventures that yield measurable social and environmental benefits alongside financial returns. In 2025, this emphasis is sharpening, as investors increasingly prioritize initiatives like affordable housing, job creation through infrastructure, and worker-owned cooperatives that foster shared prosperity. Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) exemplify this scale: their assets have grown 615% since 2014 to $458 billion in 2023, fueling renewable energy projects, small business loans, and community revitalization in underserved areas. A GlobeScan survey underscores the demand, with 78% of U.S. retail investors prioritizing the reduction of economic inequality—a priority that transcends political affiliations.

The U.S. Impact Investing Alliance captured this moment in their post-election response: "The communities across the country facing economic, social and environmental hardships need our support more than ever... We remain committed to working across ideologies to uncover areas of agreement and alignment as we strive to create shared prosperity." This bipartisan stance is crucial in an era of polarization, where anti-ESG laws in some states and backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts have posed obstacles. Yet, as Fran Seegull of the Alliance observed, these pressures have bolstered the sector by reinforcing its market-driven resilience and core value.

Blended finance offers a powerful example, blending philanthropic and commercial capital to de-risk investments in high-impact areas like regenerative agriculture and clean energy jobs, which can bridge urban-rural divides and tackle root causes of inequality. As Agustín Vitórica of GAWA Capital emphasizes, the focus must be on "long-term, transformative solutions that address root causes," such as persistent wealth gaps that limit mobility.

The real challenge lies in communication. Amit Bouri of the GIIN stresses that impact investing must "nail the narrative" to engage a divided audience. By framing it around universal values like opportunity and self-reliance, it can appeal broadly, while emphasizing economic justice through models like co-ops and wage-enhancing programs. In a recent ImpactAlpha discussion, Rachel Robasciotti of Adasina Social Capital noted that "half the country believes the time for editing existing systems is over," calling for bold steps in land ownership and inclusive growth. Failing to bridge these divides risks entrenching polarization, stalling progress on shared priorities.

Skeptics may label it "woke capitalism," but the data refutes that: 89% of Asia-focused impact investors report returns meeting or exceeding expectations, demonstrating profitability. Amid AI's job-disrupting rise and escalating energy needs, impact approaches can reskill workers and fund equitable tech transitions. If divisions impede collaboration, the working class suffers most from missed opportunities.

The imperative is clear: Policymakers should bolster impact through incentives like tax credits and partnerships, while investors refine metrics for accountability. Philanthropies and businesses must form coalitions to expand reach, as the Alliance advocates. By centering the working class—through jobs, housing, and wealth creation—impact investing can help mend societal fractures and forge a more inclusive economy. Shared prosperity demands action now, before inequalities widen irreparably.

Madison was crystal clear in Federalist No. 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” He designed our government so no single branch could dominate, ensuring liberty through checks and balances. But this bill? It’s a love letter to executive overreach. By slashing congressional oversight and piling on powers for the president—especially in areas like immigration enforcement and deregulation—it tilts the scales toward one-man rule. In Federalist No. 47, Madison warned that combining legislative, executive, and judicial powers in one place is “the very definition of tyranny.” This bill’s framework, which lets the executive bypass Congress on key policies, is exactly the kind of thing he feared.As Americans, we should be worried. This isn’t just about Trump’s tax cuts or border security—it’s about setting a precedent where any president can act like a king. If we let this slide, we’re handing future leaders a playbook to sideline the Constitution. That’s not freedom; that’s a slow slide to autocracy.

Madison saw Congress as the heart of our Republic, a place for slow, deliberate lawmaking to cool the passions of factions. In Federalist No. 10, he warned about groups pushing their own agendas over the public good. This bill, rammed through with minimal debate and a laundry list of Trump’s campaign promises, screams factionalism. It’s less a law than a loyalty oath to one man, passed in a frenzy to meet a July 4 deadline.

The House’s 218–214 vote shows how divided even Republicans were, with hardliners and moderates barely holding it together. That’s not the robust deliberation Madison envisioned—it’s a rushed power grab. As citizens, we should demand better. Laws this massive, touching everything from taxes to Medicaid, need scrutiny, not a late-night sprint. When Congress becomes a rubber stamp, we all lose.

Madison’s other big idea was federalism—keeping power split between the federal government and the states. In Federalist No. 45, he promised that federal powers would be “few and defined,” leaving states free to govern locally. But this bill tramples that balance. Its heavy-handed rules on immigration enforcement and its gutting of state-level regulations—like the 10-year ban on state AI laws—centralize power in Washington in ways Madison would’ve hated.

This isn’t just policy wonk stuff. When the federal government overrides states, they’re saying your community’s voice doesn’t matter. Whether you’re in Virginia or California, this bill tells states to sit down and shut up. That’s not the America Madison built, and it’s not the one we should accept.

Republicans Have Betrayed Their Oath

Let’s talk about the Republicans who made this happen. They campaigned on limited government, waving the Constitution like a flag. Yet they’ve just handed Trump a bill that inflates executive power, balloons the deficit by trillions, and stomps on states’ rights. This isn’t conservatism—it’s hypocrisy. Madison would be appalled, and frankly, so am I. By caving to Trump’s pressure, these lawmakers have prioritized party loyalty over their oath to the Constitution. They’ve set us on a path where power concentrates in one office, and that’s a betrayal we’ll all pay for down the road.

Here’s the real message: This bill isn’t just a policy fight—it’s a fork in the road for our Republic. Madison’s whole deal was building a system that lasts, one that stops any one person or group from hijacking the government. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” chips away at that system, and we’re the ones who’ll live with the consequences. If we let executive power swell, Congress weaken, and states get sidelined, we’re not just tweaking taxes or borders—we’re risking the checks that keep us free.

As a Virginian, as an entrepreneur, and as a board member at both James Madison’s Montpelier and the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, I’ve seen up close how Madison’s ideas fuel both liberty and prosperity. This bill threatens both. My fellow Americans, we can’t just shrug and move on. Demand accountability. Call out leaders who put party over principle. Fight for the Constitution Madison gave us—because once it’s gone, it’s gone. Let’s not let this bill be the first mile down a dangerous road.

I write to you not as a shadow of the past but as one whose spirit remains tethered to the cause of liberty, learning, and the self-governance of our beloved Commonwealth. When I founded the University of Virginia, I did so with a singular purpose: to create a sanctuary of knowledge, where the pursuit of truth could thrive, unburdened by the meddling hand of government. Education, I held, is the lifeblood of a free people, and our universities must stand as bastions of free inquiry, beyond the reach of political caprice. Today, that vision is imperiled, and I call upon you to rise in its defense.

The federal government has struck a blow against our University of Virginia, forcing the resignation of President Jim Ryan. His crime? Championing initiatives of diversity, equity, and inclusion—efforts that, though foreign in name to my era, echo the pursuit of justice and understanding I believed essential to a virtuous republic. The Trump administration, brandishing the threat of withheld funding, demanded his removal to settle an investigation into these very initiatives. This is no mere dispute over policy; it is a naked overreach of federal power, an assault on the autonomy of our university and the sacred principle of academic freedom.

This outrage is not confined to the grounds of Charlottesville. The same federal hand has descended upon Harvard and other institutions, stripping them of billions in resources and menacing their independence. Our universities are not tools to be wielded by those in power; they are the crucibles where ideas are forged and the minds of our future leaders shaped. Yet, this is but the beginning. If the federal government can dictate who governs our halls of learning, what shall prevent it from bending our courts, our press, or the very fabric of our democracy to its will?

In my day, I stood resolute for the rights of states and institutions to govern themselves, free from the tyranny of centralized authority. The actions of this administration are a betrayal of that creed. They seek to transform our universities into instruments of political design, using financial coercion as their weapon. This is a precedent most perilous, my friends—a step toward the erosion of all that keeps our republic free.

I beseech you, people of Virginia, to see this for what it is: an encroachment upon the foundations of our liberty. The strength of our nation rests upon the education of its citizens and the independence of its institutions. We must not suffer this overreach in silence. Let us stand as one, as we have in times past, to shield our universities from the grasp of federal power and preserve them as sanctuaries of knowledge, not pawns in political machinations.

The hour demands action. Lift your voices against this injustice. Write to your representatives, lend your support to those who defend our institutions, and proclaim that Virginia will not bend to federal intimidation. Our universities, our courts, our press—all must remain free from the overreach of centralized dominion. In this struggle, we uphold not merely the legacy of our Commonwealth but the very principles upon which our nation was built.

In the name of liberty and learning,

Thomas Jefferson

This op-ed reflects the views and principles of Thomas Jefferson, as interpreted through his writings and beliefs, written as if he were responding to today’s events.