Like a Substack squirrel preparing for winter, I’ve been spending late summer busily gathering tasty and nutritious nuts articles that help me think through my favorite complex issues. And of course, the biggest one for me recently has been how we can build sufficient habitat for humans and non-humans alike, from housing to clean energy to restored wetlands, prairies and forests.

I’m convinced that there are joint solutions to these problems of scarcity for humans and nature: from streamlining regulations to expedite restoration and renewable energy projects alike, to building solar energy as a tool to finance invasive plant treatments, to incentivizing denser urban housing to save nature outside the city limits - there are many possibilities.

Enjoy the lovely nuggets below (unlike a real squirrel, I’m happy to share), and I’d love to hear what you think!

Three key things to read and watch

1. Are Apartments Bad for the Environment? (Justine Underhill / Youtube)

2. Seeing the Forest for the Trees (US Representative Scott Peters / Substack)

3. The End of the Endangered Species Act? (Substack / Maxwell Tabarrok)

The longer list, if you have time

• The Case for an Environmentalism that Builds (The Economist) (PDF link here)

• America’s Housing Boom Risks Creating Tomorrow’s Housing Crisis (Elizabeth Carmichael / Newsweek)

• How to Build an Affordable Energy Future (Manish Bapna, Democracy Journal)

• Abundance Thinking is for Environmentalists, Too (Sophie Gilbert / Substack)

• Permit Me to Restore (Danielle Bissett / Substack)

• Abundance for Who? (Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality)

• Housing Density is a Win-Win for Nature and People (Max Lambert / The Urbanist)

• Why NIMBYs Hate Housing (The Argument)

The list of cool things to read keeps getting longer… maybe I’ll start posting a reading list regularly, as new ideas come into my sweaty little paws.

Ask a first grader to draw a bison, and they’ll probably sketch you a brown beast with shaggy shoulders, a stylish goatee, and horns —pretty much a weird, hairy cow. Ask a historian, and they might draw a vast, rolling herd, perhaps being hunted by Native Americans, settlers, hide traders, or the U.S. Army.

But ask an ecologist to draw you a bison, and you’ll get a more complicated picture. It includes a whole lot of other creatures, so many that the bison looks like an afterthought, a tiny brown meatball at the center of a sprawling spaghetti diagram. But the small scale reflects their outsized ecological importance, achieved through relationships with many other organisms.

Note: this is a re-posting of a piece I wrote for PERC (the Property and Environment Research Center), where I am a senior researcher, and is part of a whole special issue on the economics, ecology, and law of our national mammal, the Bison. Read the whole special issue here

Read the full 'Bisonomics' Issue

The bison emerges as a central node in an intricate web moving nutrients and energy around the community of living things within the ecosystem. Bison connect to grasses and forbs by feeding on them. But they also link to things far beyond: to soil microbial communities, prairie dogs and badgers, deer and elk, pronghorn and cattle, coyotes and wolves, and many more, through processes including competition, nutrient deposition, soil disturbance, and, eventually, provision of their carcasses as food.

A bison’s ecology is defined by its relationships to other living things, yet most bison today are privately owned and constrained by fences, rather than free-roaming. Some of the relational threads that once connected bison to their ecosystems, and to people, are either broken or missing. Yet even a frayed web has value. And where bison threads remain, they still bind.

From the Ground Up

From their teeth to their guts, grazing animals like bison are specialized to eat grass, as well as forbs and other plants. But just as surely, grass has adapted over eons to be grazed. Buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides), a warm-season, fast-growing species, has evolved to be extremely resilient to herbivores eating it, as well as to drought.

One of its primary adaptations is being able to regrow and spread via underground runners, called stolons, which over time produce a thick, tough mat of roots, matched by a large patch of soft, gray-green foliage aboveground that can quickly resprout from the base even after heavy grazing.

Rapid regrowth is a good trait to have, because a herd of bison can cause considerable damage to grass. They crop its blades short, and they trample it with all of the pressure brought to bear by 2,000 pounds concentrated onto four sets of hooves, multiplied across an entire herd. Bison diets are roughly 80 percent grass in the shortgrass prairie, mostly because that’s the dominant vegetation. But the grass gets something in return.

As these shaggy eating machines move across the prairie, not only are they grazing, they are also disturbing the soil by wallowing and raining down nutrients in their feces and urine. The bison thunderstorm rolls in, tramples, crops, wallows, and fertilizes, then leaves a churned and fecund zone of opportunity in its wake. Where dominant grasses are heavily grazed by bison or cattle, or burned by wildfire for that matter, other prairie plants can better compete. Where wallows create bare dirt, rare plant species that specialize in newly disturbed habitats can colonize. Outside of the wallows, the buffalo grass resprouts from its stolons, supercharged by the gift of nutrients.

Buffalo grass and other prairie plants are well-adapted to these bison thunderstorms thanks to a long history with heavy herbivory. Bison are the last of a mega-herbivore menagerie that once roamed the Great Plains. Most died out following the last ice age, including mastodons, North American camels, and other massive grass-eaters.

But unlike most of the other mega-herbivores, bison abundance increased greatly in the warming climate conditions following the ice age. During the same period, dominant prairie vegetation shifted from cool-season to warm-season grasses, which are highly resilient to intense herbivory. By the time Europeans arrived, bison were distributed in a wide, vertical “bison belt” that extended from Alaska all the way south to Mexico and covered almost 60 percent of the continent, spreading from the Rocky Mountains eastward to the Atlantic.

Diminished Yet Consequential

The rise of ecological research trailed the massacre and decline of free-roaming bison. We are left trying to piece together a picture of how bison interacted with their past grassland and prairie ecosystems by studying much smaller and more sedentary modern herds.

Most shortgrass and tallgrass prairie that were once bison strongholds have been converted to agriculture. And most remaining prairie will never feel a bison’s hoof and are instead managed with cattle grazing, sometimes with the addition of prescribed fire. But today’s diminished herds reveal that bison can impact entire ecosystems, if they are given sufficient time and space to throw their weight around.

The vast majority of plains bison roaming North America today are privately owned, held by commercial ranching operations, tribal governments, or conservation groups. Unlike domestic cattle, most are pastured on rangeland year-round, although they are constrained by physical fences, unlike their wild forebears.

Across studies, bison exhibit more movement, less time grazing, and less time spent near water than cattle. Similarly, bison select foraging patches at much larger scales than cattle, even in private herds. For example, research led by the University of Montana found that bison grazed patches of 20,000 to 30,000 acres at a time at American Prairie (a private conservation herd in Montana) and Grasslands National Park (a public herd in Saskatchewan), an area larger than most private ranches in the western U.S. For comparison, cows in the same study used patches of only 120 to 1,000 acres, despite similar stocking densities. Modern bison herds average fewer than 200 animals—far too small to support the full breadth of bison ecological processes, unless herds and acreage grow dramatically.

Bison migration is another factor constrained for today’s private and public herds alike. Long-distance movement is one of the species’ defining behavioral and ecological differences from cattle, and they would travel much farther if untrammeled. For example, the Yellowstone bison are the only migratory herd in the lower 48 states. From just a couple dozen tenuous survivors of the 1800s slaughter, the herd has grown to thousands strong.

Yellowstone bison now migrate from low-elevation winter range to higher summer areas, increasing grass growth and protein content along their route by grazing and fertilizing. Yet even this herd, which appears quintessentially wild, is controlled in numbers, behavior, and ecology.

The herd size is capped by human culling, and private land near the park constrains winter range, although conservation agreements have increased the amount of available habitat, and transfer programs to tribes decrease herd density. Some ecological evidence suggests that the herd is too numerous, exceeding historic densities and resulting in deterioration of riparian condition within the park.

Yet despite restrictions on herd size, range, and movement, today’s bison still perform many other behaviors distinct from cattle that yield ecological benefits. They still graze, horn, and wallow as their instincts dictate. They move rapidly and widely within the limits of their pasture boundaries, reducing grazing pressure on any one patch of prairie and boosting many kinds of grassland biodiversity, from birds to beetles.

Bison-grazed prairies also show increased resilience to drought, an increasingly relevant metric for conservation and livestock production alike in our changing world. All of these documented ecological functions of bison in private and public herds are manifesting despite higher stocking densities than would likely have occurred under wild, unrestricted conditions in the past.

Perhaps all bison exist somewhere along a continuum of ecological function. The wider bison can roam, the more of their ecological functions they can fulfill. Many conservationists say that bison are ecologically extinct because they can no longer graze across the enormous scales they once did. Yet for some private herds, their size and movements may be approaching many if not most “bison functions.” For example, Turner Enterprises grazes 45,000 bison or so across a dozen massive U.S. ranches, while The Nature Conservancy owns approximately 6,600 bison across 11 different locations. These herds are managed to benefit ecosystems and biodiversity. And while these private rangelands, and the pasture management units within them, are likely still not large enough to allow bison to fully manifest their ecological functions, there are undoubtedly major components of ecological “bisoning” that are occurring at scale for large private herds such as these, and on smaller operations to lesser degrees.

Broadening the Bison Belt

What is the potential future for bison, numerically and ecologically? After all, the plains bison’s scientific name—Bison bison bison—conjures up abundance as its primary characteristic. Of the American bison alive today, perhaps 25,000 are in tribal herds, with another 30,000 in public or private conservation herds. Most, however, are in for-profit herds, which have leveled off at fewer than 200,000 over recent years. Eighty-two percent are in the western U.S., in herds of 200 on average. In the East, commercial herds usually number fewer than 50. And while most managers of private herds report managing for ecological values, these herd sizes of dozens to hundreds are unlikely to achieve massive ecological benefits.

Even the smallest herd serves a function that ecological accounting rarely captures: connecting people to land. Simply encountering wildlife in a captive zoo setting can spark a connection with nature for people that manifests in a greater commitment to conservation action. Likewise, seeing a bison herd even behind fences can be a memorable experience, for children and adults alike—a reminder of their wild and free ancestors—and can help people develop lasting attachments to particular landscapes, and a stake in conserving them.

Tribal herds hold great promise for scaling bison ecologically while restoring relationships with people. Beginning in the 1990s, Native American and First Nations governments in the U.S. and Canada organized and collaborated to restore bison, primarily on indigenously managed land. These tribal herds have grown to more than 30,000 animals across all of North America, and are still expanding, unlike the stagnant aggregate numbers of commercially managed bison. This growth is the result of cultural, spiritual, nutritional, and economic benefits that bison bring to tribal communities. Given the huge acreage managed by tribes and their members, there is much more restoration potential.

In the future, increasing drought and shifting beef markets could make bison more competitive with or complementary to cattle production. Bison are hardier than cattle and, with enough pasture, capable of self-sufficiency year-round. They also eat lower-quality forage, and graze farther from water, making fuller use of arid land than cattle. And bison grazing itself can bolster drought resilience in the prairie plant community, another potential economic upside for bison.

As long as there is growing demand for bison meat, there are market incentives for the private herds to continue to grow in size. And growth in numbers may lead to more opportunities to manage bison so that their ecological function grows more capacious. After all, they can be so much more than big, hairy brown cows. Bison thunderstorms, or at least buffalo showers, could once again move across landscapes. The shortgrass prairie, at least, wouldn’t care whether they were wild or not.

But what if environmentalists are angry about the wrong things?

The environmental movement has specialized in stopping nature loss, but in so doing, has given up a lot of gains. We should be much angrier than we are about all the good things for nature that are being blocked (artificial nature scarcities). And we should be much better than we are at understanding what drives nature recovery, and doing more of it (as wrote about this week).

We should be mad that habitat restoration is made much slower and costlier by permitting burdens. That renewable energy projects can be blocked by NIMBYs wielding environmental regulations as a cudgel. That restrictive housing policies in urban areas are rippling out to create more sprawl in neighboring open space. We should be mad that NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) makes the government lay out their harm to nature but does not make them fix it. That the Endangered Species Act has stopped 99% of listed species from going extinct but recovered just a small fraction of them. That it took decades to bring down defunct dams that blocked salmon recovery on the Klamath River.

The environmental movement should be hungry for real, innovative solutions to these artificial scarcities of nature – which is what they are. With the right fixes to policy and practice, we could have much more: more wildlife habitat restored, more renewable energy built, more urban houses yielding less sprawl, and more species recovered.

There’s another group of innovators out there who are very interested in fixing artificial scarcities — the abundance movement. Many environmentalists read the book “Abundance,” which calls for radical changes to policy and practice to build more needed human habitat, as a threat to nature. After all, more human infrastructure comes with an environmental price tag, and some of the policy fixes proposed involve laws meant to protect the environment. But I see it as an invitation, and an opportunity.

Despite the misunderstandings and caricatures across the environmental-abundance divide, there are many shared goals between these movements. And surprisingly, this applies even to factions of the environmental movement that seem on the surface to be at odds with abundance thinking, like those that espouse economic de-growth as the path to sustainability.

The buildout of needed human habitat will not be stopped, but it can be shaped, and leveraged to produce better outcomes for both nature and people. We can also develop our own solutions to artificial scarcities of nature, and find new allies willing to help us enact them. That’s why we should be willing to think about grand bargains and trade-offs with willing partners like the Abundance movement.

What does the environmental movement want more of?

For too long, environmental goals have been synonymous with reduction. Reducing supply (of housing developments, of fossil fuel, of roads), and also reducing demand (for plane flights, for meat, and so on). It may seem odd at first to think of achieving environmental goals by overcoming artificial scarcities. But Abundance thinking can be applied to unblock artificial scarcity of whatever you care about. Abundance is a mind-set, not just a movement, just like environmental sustainability, and the two are not incompatible.

To be effective, environmentalism needs to switch mindsets and begin fighting for more of what it does want, instead of less of what it doesn’t. And it needs to care about people, and actively fight for them, too.

Personally, I want more salmon, by making it faster to build solar and decommission dams. I want more restored prairies and forests, by reducing years-long permitting burdens on those projects. I want more birds, by building the clean energy to fix climate change (which is why Audubon is leading the charge on building renewables). My environmental wish list, and the abundance solutions that go with it, is pretty long. And we should be willing to work with other people who share enough of our goals to get there, because the alternative is less, for people and for nature.

And if the environmental movement wants to win and keep real political power, they are going to need to deliver more, for people and nature both. Here are a few key ways that Abundance thinking could help solve huge problems for people and nature.

More renewables

Renewable energy is the key to stopping and reversing climate change. Environmental groups have mostly realized this. For many, this is their first experience with seeing their goals thwarted by the byzantine processes that make it slow and expensive to build stuff in our country. A few are now responding by collaborating at the project level, pushing to build more clean energy, storage and transmission in regions across the country. Others continue to argue for restoration of federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act or similar policies that subsidize demand.

However, most remain on the fence about working with Abundance interests to unblock supply. This would mean reforms to environmental laws and permitting processes that give them a sense of safety and control when faced with projects they don’t like. But reform is coming, and we can either help shape it to our liking, or watch others reshape it without us in ways that might be much worse for the environment.

For example, the USFWS recently re-defined “harm” under the endangered species act so that it no longer covers harms to habitat, even though habitat loss is the biggest reason for species endangerment. That’s because ESA-listed species are weaponized by NIMBY objectors to stop housing and other infrastructure via our broken permitting systems3. As recent analysis showed, the result is that each ESA listing reduces housing permits, including urban infill, multi-family housing developments that probably have no impact on listed species4. The environmental movement should be enraged that our laws and arguments are being co-opted, and work to fix the permitting system so that ESA listings protect species, not wealthy homeowners.

Climate migration means more building and restoration

The most obvious case for more new stuff if environmentalists ran the world is climate migration. Millions of people worldwide, and lots within the U.S., are going to be displaced in the coming decades5.

Helping these displaced people means building new human habitat (the ecological word for all the things a species needs to survive) at a massive scale. And that means building a lot of physical things, even in highly developed countries (as Cincinnati is proposing to do6). This need will persist even when human populations stop growing or decline. There’s no getting around the massive expense involved, but it could be faster, cheaper, and better for nature if we improve policy and processes.

Leaving people stuck in unsafe places or holding mortgages on homes that are no longer insurable or sellable is a terrible option, not only for people but also for nature. Land that is no longer good habitat for humans could be restored to be prime habitat for wildlife instead, as the state-run Blue Acres Program is doing via buy-backs and habitat restoration in coastal New Jersey.

More broadly, housing is still a tricky topic for environmental groups. Many of their grassroots urban members are deeply motivated by and attached to their local nature (not a bad thing). But when NIMBYs use environmental laws and arguments to throttle new urban housing supply, the result is not better for nature. Instead, we get housing “leakage”, sprawling into neighboring suburbs and exurbs and eating up open space, usually with a higher impact to nature AND climate, as well as bad outcomes for working people with longer commutes7. That’s why thoughtfully backing policies that yield more and higher-density urban housing should become a core concern for conservation groups.

More restoration of ecosystems

We’ll want to restore all that abandoned human habitat, rather than just letting it recover on its own. Forgoing the water cleaning and storage, carbon sequestration, recreation opportunities, habitat for wildlife, and protection from storms and wildfires that well-functioning ecosystems provide would be foolish. Making it slower and more expensive is therefore foolish, too.

Likewise, building so-called natural infrastructure, like oyster reefs, mangroves and other coastal wetlands, can be a very efficient way to protect against storm surges. Inland, thinning and prescribed burning in fire-prone forests is a great way to reduce wildfire risk to humans and property.

Yet these natural infrastructure projects face the same permitting barriers that the housing and energy projects do, and which the Abundance movement is trying to dismantle. Today, 30-50% of restoration project budgets, and years of delay, go to permitting, mostly because of environmental regulations meant to protect nature8.

The Massive Middle

If the environmental movement is going to gain and hold political power, it will need workable solutions to solving scarcity, for nature and for people. And that means overcoming our fear, thinking through an Abundance lens, and working coalitionally with those who want more good things for nature, and people.

Luckily, the Venn Diagram overlap between Abundance and the Environment is potentially really big. This is where there is agreement that human thriving and nature are both important, to varying degrees. And equally important, in terms of political viability, the left-out fringes are pretty unappealing to most Americans.

On the environmental side, the remainder is the “Nature First” folks, who think of humans and nature as separate, and humans as innately harmful to, and lower-priority than, nature. Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of modern conservation, said “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Leopold probably didn’t mean it this way, but Nature Firsters take this kind of thinking to its logical extremes, misanthropically defining humans as innately destructive and not-so-quietly rooting for our extinction so that nature can thrive un-encumbered. This is not a majority view in the environmental world. It is also not a popular stance with most people, who would like to be respected and not treated as expendable or undesirable.

The Abundance-side analogue is Dark Abundance, as identified by Steven Teles at Niskanen in his “Varieties of Abundance,”9 who believe that profit-seeking is the sole solution, and prefer putting environmental and climate concerns and regulations in the wood-chipper rather than reforming them.

At first glance, sacrificing nature for people would seem to be a more publicly appealing position. But nature is enduringly popular, and for good reason. The majority of the global economy is moderately or highly dependent on nature.10 Large bipartisan majorities are in favor of laws that protect the environment11 in America and elsewhere, although when faced with hard trade-offs with development, that support declines somewhat.12

So there is a massive, politically-viable middle, where other flavors of Abundance, plus the Green Growthers, are quietly rubbing shoulders and debating solutions, if not yet outright collaborating. And this is where degrowthers belong, I’d argue, not over with the Nature Firsters.

The degrowth wing of the environmental movement says, enough is enough, no more new stuff. Humans need to limit our economic growth, because it depends on unsustainable levels of natural resource consumption. The best tagline I’ve heard for it is “public luxury and private sufficiency.”13

So de-growthers want abundance (of some things), too. To get there, they argue that developed nations should lower their consumption, allowing developing nations to catch up on standards of living through growth (a tough political sell, when many American citizens cannot afford their costs of living in their communities).

But less new stuff doesn’t mean no new stuff, particularly in the face of ongoing degradation of our housing stocks and ecosystems, and the need to build a lot more clean energy. Why not make these key projects and objects that we do need to build faster and cheaper?

A big tent

Environmentalists may not ever love houses (although we should see urban density as a great alternative to sprawl). But you know what we do love? Tents! Our old tent is small, tattered, and leaking. And the birdsong we went camping to appreciate is a lot quieter than it used to be. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of progress to be made over in the big Abundance tent, and by using Abundance thinking to solve conservation problems. And eventually, when there’s enough progress for people, and nature, those left out may want in. After all, there will be a lot more bears out there.

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But most of Maine is nothing like this. We drove here through wooded, rocky country where both the population and housing stock is aging. Maine has the 4th lowest economic growth rate in the country, and housing prices in the state have more than doubled in the past decade. If we’d kept on going past the turnoff for this outlier of an island, in a half hour we’d have arrived in Sullivan, the home of the country’s most infamous oyster farmer, Graham Platner (luckily for him, he got a $200k loan from his dad to buy his house).

Platner for Senate signs may be coming down, but the populist messages he ran on persist among the many candidates now vying to replace him. Their proposed fixes for Maine’s housing crises include populist favorites like government-built affordable housing, federal programs to train more construction workers, protections to stop hedge funds and other institutional investors from purchasing houses, and rent control and eviction protections.

What’s not front and center yet, and should be, are reforms to make it easier and faster to build market-rate housing. Not populist, or popular with the democratic base (yet), but highly effective. Which brings me back to my row of stair-step snail shells, and the very weird little crustacean that would like to call them home.

Hermit crabs, like humans, are deeply dependent on housing for security and survival. That’s because these are not your average crusty crustaceans: unlike their close relatives along this coast, the (delicious) lobsters, they don’t grow a natural suit of armor to protect their soft insides. Instead, hermit crabs hide inside hard yet movable shells made by others, usually marine snails. Mostly, they wait for a larger hermit crab to vacate a suitable shell, or for a snail to die, making them supply-constrained housing consumers just like us. And just like many young people watching baby boomers continue to occupy big, family-sized houses, this waiting is probably pretty frustrating.

They don’t spend their whole lives waiting— after hatching from eggs, hermit crab larvae swim around for a while, eating, growing, and drifting with the currents. But after this teenager phase, they find a nice shell and settle down to the sea floor, although they still scoot around in their mobile homes. And because hermit crabs grow as they get older, moving out of their starter shells into progressively bigger shell homes helps them survive and reproduce more successfully.

If Zillow was available to hermit crabs, there is no doubt they’d be scrolling through new listings obsessively. Hermits are constantly scoping out potential new homes, and if they find one, they’ll crawl up to it, inspect it closely, and then in less than a minute, switch over to the new one if it’s better than the old. Their vacated shells may lie empty, but often a smaller hermit crab will be on the lookout nearby, and will transfer in turn.

Humans and hermit crabs are so similar in terms of housing needs that there’s even a shared language for some of the resulting patterns. The concept of “vacancy chains,” where an individuals’ mobility is affected by others using a shared resource, has spread across disciplines, from labor to housing and ecology. The “vacancy chains” created by hermit crabs upgrading their shells can be long, cascading across many crabs, especially if it a so-called “synchronous” vacancy chain, where the crabs all move at once. People used to do this too, in a previous era. During the May 1st Mayhem of “Moving Day,” Americans across many major cities would move houses and apartments, sizing up and down as needed to fit their family’s needs. There was also extortion, eviction, and other nasty forms of exploitation we’ve reduced in the current day, but and others have concluded that this culture of mass movement, coupled with a fast-growing, abundant housing stock, was a net good for American economic, social, and physical mobility.

Market-based solutions exist in crab land. To facilitate shell exchange, crabs with ill-fitting shells cluster together in “shell exchange markets,” which makes it easier, faster and therefore safer to switch shells. This is similar to what happens when more market-rate human housing is built in urban areas (for a nice survey of recent evidence, see post). For example, recent research in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that when a new, high-end condo building was constructed, it allowed people to upgrade, freeing up their older, more affordable housing units, which in turn allowed another family to upgrade, and so on, along a chain of vacancies.

People upgrading to a fancier housing unit also generally moved to a fancier neighborhood, which means that the vacancy chains crossed socioeconomic lines, freeing up more affordable units in less fancy neighborhoods. This phenomenon is why enabling more market-rate housing to be built is a primary goal for the Abundance Movement, as it seeks to create more housing supply to drop prices. But not all vacancy chains are long. New suburban houses, for example, translate into relatively short vacancy chains, and do not ripple to lower-income urban households very effectively.

Just like frustrated humans facing the housing crisis, hermit crabs are getting pinched by a tightening shell supply in many places. Snails face climate and environmental change, including ocean acidification resulting from mounting atmospheric CO2 dissolving into ocean water. More acidic seawater stymies snails as they build and repair their calcium carbonate shells. Even weirder, more acidic ocean water makes it harder for hermit crabs to make good shell choices in the first places, possibly by altering their sense of smell. And in some places, seashells, and hermit crabs themselves, are being collected at unsustainable rates.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and some species of hermit crabs (the terrestrial rather than marine varieties) seem to be trying to adapt to the modern, ecologically-degraded world by using plastic bottle caps and other man-made debris as alternative housing. But they also seem to prefer natural shell alternatives, and micro-plastics themselves can mess with the crabs’ house-hunting skills.

People are also making some hard housing choices that don’t track with escalating climate risks, because cheaper housing is often located in places with more flooding, wildfire, and hurricanes. As a result, people have moved disproportionately into harms way, although this may be starting to change as insurance rates climb in response.

As climate change escalates, we’ll need to figure out how to manage retreat from the most dangerous areas, as well as build a whole lot of new housing and infrastructure in places that are safer and more stable. Tools like buyouts and transfers of development rights can help, but we’ll need to use Abundance-flavored solutions to also make all of this building fast and relatively affordable as well.

Unlike the poor hermit crabs stuck in their plastic bottle caps, humans can act to increase their own housing abundance, and voters continue to care a lot about affordability and housing, especially younger folks. I hope Mainers choose a senator who thinks deeply about housing and affordability, and is willing to go beyond what’s currently popular to also embrace what’s actually effective. Hermit crabs can’t vote, but if they could, I think they’d raise a claw for more housing.

Let’s begin.

Back in the day, ladies used to wear hats. All. The. Time. You could not leave the house without a hat, and a hat said a lot about you and your social status. And for high-status ladies of the Gilded Age (late 1800’s-early 1900’s), fancy feathers were a must.

And all those fancy feathers came from dead birds. There was a massive millinary market for feathers, in the US and internationally, peaking prior to the first world war. Many were ostrich plumes, which were actually one of the more sustainable options, since they were mostly farmed. But plenty came from wild birds, and this demand drove many birds to the brink of extinction. Our national hunger for feathers was so intense that it led to the collapse of herons and egrets, who have very long, fancy feathers during breeding season. Egret populations plummeted, falling by 95% in the US.

But things were about to get a whole lot better for egrets. They now number in the millions in the U.S., while our national taste in hats has… evolved.

And the same conservation group that saved the egrets is now helping build out renewable energy. The egrets to energy storyline is a bit circuitous, like the silhouette of one of those outrageous hats. But to me, a fan of both conservation and more “human habitat” (much-needed energy, houses, transit, etc.), it’s a wild and hopeful tale worth telling.

Not all the ladies were happy about the dead birds on hats. A small group of women came together in 1846 in Boston, organizing a series of teas to convince other society women to give up feathered plumes in their hats. From there, they went on to found the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which in 1905 became the National Association of Audubon Societies (now known as the National Audubon Society).

The Audubon Society helped build the American conservation movement, from working to establish wildlife refuges (fun fact: the first refuge in the National Wildlife Refuge system was created by Teddy Roosevelt to protect egrets and other nesting birds from feather hunters) to supporting foundational environmental laws like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Endangered Species Act.

From their history, you might predict that Audubon would be one of the “just say no” groups in the environmental movement, resisting all projects that might impact birds at local levels, without thinking about the bigger conservation consequences spilling over elsewhere. But you’d be very wrong. As pointed out in a recent essay, most environmental groups are not spending their time opposing things in court. But Audubon goes beyond “not suing to stop projects”, instead championing renewable energy with the same fervor they brought to saving egrets. And their efforts has been instrumental to building energy projects across America.

Audubon’s activism for more clean energy makes a lot of sense, in terms of the Big Picture for conserving birds. A lot of bird species are highly sensitive to environmental change, and to climate change in particular. Many migrate thousands of miles each year from summer breeding areas with lots of food and fewer predators, to winter ranges where the weather is milder. They carefully calibrate their journeys to align with seasonal weather and foods, balancing on a caloric knife-edge of fueling and flying. And while much remains to be learned about bird migration, we know that climate change is disrupting this balance, shifting the timing and location of food and other critical components of success.

And like the birds they conserve, Audubon was early to respond to climate change, starting two decades ago. It’s also clearly been a learning journey, for leadership, staff, and their 2 million members. In 2008, they helped found the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute, which researches best practices for improving the environmental outcomes of renewable energy (there’s a lot of innovation happening, such as automatic eagle shutoffs at windfarms). Then in 2014, Audubon issued a landmark report showing that over 300 species of birds in the US were threatened by climate change, directly and indirectly. Two years later, they expanded their analysis globally, concluding that the birds were delivering a clear call to action:

“Birds help people to engage with nature and understand the impacts of climate change. They are sending us powerful messages: cut emissions, help species adapt, invest in nature-based solutions for people, and act now.”

Following this excellent advice from the birds, in 2019, Audubon’s president at the time, David Yarnold, published a letter calling on his membership and staff to actively champion renewable energy at all levels. But this was not a shock to members, because Audubon had been making the case for helping build out the clean energy for years.

Since then, Audubon has been pushing ahead on renewable energy policy and practice, from grassroots efforts by local chapters, to actions by state chapters all the way up to the national level. They now have many staff members, including high-level leadership, with clean energy expertise, and are hiring state policy staffers to push for change in statehouses and governors’ mansions across the US. For example, their 2024 report proudly proclaims:

“Over the last 12 months, Audubon has been involved in the planning, permitting, siting, or operation of over 36 gigawatts of onshore and offshore wind and solar projects, as well as almost 45 gigawatts of transmission capacity.”

Digging into Audubon’s 2025 annual report, building 100 GW of renewable energy is one of their five main conservation goals, and they report on progress, in GW. They are 50% of the way there already.

Audubon is by far the most pro-infrastructure environmental organization I’ve come across. They are walking the talk across the organization. Partnering with the NextGen Highways commission, they helped pass legislation in Mississippi streamlining transmission buildouts along existing highways, minimizing ecological footprints while speeding up transmission building. In Washington, they are championing a new state Clean Energy Authority, and in 2019 helped pass the Clean Energy Transformation Act, committing Washington to an electricity supply free of greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. In New Mexico, they helped broker a new 137-mile transmission line, where impacts to the lesser prairie chicken, a rare and declining bird, were offset through habitat conservation in a nearby area. Nationally, they are strongly advocating for policies to speed grid improvements, and helped streamline permitting for wind farms through a new general permit, where wind projects that can demonstrate that they are reducing risks to eagles receive expedited permitting.

The list of real, concrete stuff that Audubon has done is longer than an egret’s tail feathers. They follow a clear logic chain to its conservation conclusion:

If climate change is an existential threat to birds, acting to reduce emissions is critical for bird conservation. If the best way to reduce emissions is to rapidly build renewable energy and transmission, then we, as bird conservationists, should actively seek to build this energy infrastructure.

I wish more environmental groups were like Audubon, walking right past rhetoric to executing real, on-the-ground actions and partnerships, including wrestling with trade-offs rather than holding out for perfect, impossible outcomes. In 1900, saving birds meant changing women’s fashion, and the law. In 2026, it requires building a lot of renewable energy.

I also wish that environmental groups like Audubon would make the leap to connecting conservation goals with how we build other types of infrastructure beyond renewables, like housing. Here’s how that logic chain would go:

If habitat loss is an existential threat to birds, reducing habitat loss is critical for conservation. If housing sprawl is a primary driver of bird habitat loss, we as bird conservationists should help build higher-density housing instead.

Following through on this conservation conclusion could be done in similar ways to Audubon’s approach to renewable energy. Making it faster and cheaper to build dense housing in desirable urban areas would spare wildlife habitat and open space, while also yielding indirect climate benefits (all that avoided driving!). A conservation agenda for housing has yet to emerge— from an ecologically-weighted land value tax, to championing municipal zoning and permitting reforms, to helping organize and incentivize managed climate retreat (for example, buyouts, demolition and restoration of housing in unsafe areas, while incentivizing rebuilding in safer areas using transfers of development rights). There are so many ways where conservation groups could contribute, and having conservation groups make the positive case for denser housing could convince a different set of stakeholders, and counter NIMBY tactics that coopt environmental arguments and regulations.

Perhaps urban housing policy is the next frontier for forward thinking conservation groups. It would certainly gain them some new fans in the Abundance Movement, and forge connections with the next generation of young people who want different forms and densities of housing than we are currently offering them (as eloquently writes about), and are excited to build beautiful, urban human habitats that include nature. While Audubon and others are already work on housing, it is through narrower lenses, like trying to stop sprawl into wildlife habitats via restrictions to land use, or small-scale partnerships with affordable housing trusts.

Could Audubon once again lead the way, by boldly and actively helping build denser human habitat, at speed and scale, to reduce the impacts of low-density sprawl on wildlife? Will other conservation and environmental groups step up to meet the moment?

I’ll be cheering if they do. And so will the egrets.

I shocked a lot of people and thrilled others who perhaps were also longing for change in their own lives. But for me, it was not a shock, or a thrill— it was a necessity.

Big change happens when it’s the only acceptable option. Sure, sometimes it happens when it doesn’t have to, but we’re humans, and we often like things to stay the same. That’s why I thought it might be useful to share my own journey through “necessary change,” with its challenges and joys. Perhaps it will be useful to others contemplating their own trajectories.

I grew up through turmoil, and I didn’t like it, at all. As a kid, I didn’t get a say in how things shifted in our lives. As my parents left their high-control religious group (It was a cult! Here’s a podcast), I was ripped from my social fabric and had to stitch my tattered self into mainstream American Culture. Suffice it to say, my new rural middle school did not greet my tie-died, nature-loving, flute-playing self with open arms. As a de facto immigrant in America, I learned to substitute TV references for tie die, but retain an underlying sense of otherness to this day.

I am also very fond of durability as a result. I live in a hundred-year-old brick house, and my hobby is pottery, the outputs of which can last 1,000 years. You get the picture. But despite all that, I’ve changed a my own (professional) life profoundly in the past few years, because I think our entire system for collective decisions and actions is in need of an overhaul.

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Slowly dawning understanding

The realization that I had to change my professional life was less a bolt of lightning, and more a long dawn. A barely-perceptible lightening, a subtle stripe of navy blue against black; then, the skyward suffusion of purple, pink and esaffron. Finally, the sun blazing over the horizon, undeniably illuminating what was only dimly visible.

But clarity is not always comfortable. I had a cushy and coveted job for which I’d trained for over a decade, first as an undergraduate, then a PhD student, and finally as a postdoctoral researcher. And if I just kept going, I’d have stability for life (words to make a younger me swoon).

The early signs that change might be needed had been there for awhile, but I’d been working hard to ignore them. My frustrations festered as my research on wildlife conservation failed to move the needle for the things I cared about, and I slowly realized that the entire system for natural resource management was stuck. After a decade publishing “applied” conservation research, most of the papers I’d written had never been applied at all, instead just collecting digital dust.

But change is scary. It was so much easier to keep running on the career wheel— winning grants supporting students publishing papers bolstering my next grant application, and so on. It was hard to find the time to look up from tending my tiny, un-scalable science start-up. And parts of it were really fun! I loved working with smart, creative scientists, collecting data in beautiful places, and discovering brand-new ecological knowledge. And yes, I didn’t love the teaching, arguably the highest-impact part of being a professor. But I was told this was the best job to possibly have, by my mentors and peers, and for awhile, I believed them.

For me, it a series of catalytic events illuminated my professional life in a harsh yet necessary light. The birth of my first son, into the teeth of the pandemic in June 2020, led to the visceral realization that the world was changing much faster than I’d thought. My tiny new bundle of humanity would (hopefully) be very much alive in 2100, which made all those dire, distant predictions about the future of climate, nature, and resulting human suffering feel very real, and very soon.

Then, a fatefully-scheduled road trip yielded anything but freedom. We ended up trapped in our car, white-knuckling our way from Idaho to California in the 105 degree heat-dome. We sped through columns of wildfire smoke, mushrooming up from blazes on both sides of the highway near Mt. Lassen. The air was so hot and unhealthy that we couldn’t safely take our toddler out of the car.

Later that summer, my parents, who live in the so-called WUI (Wildland-Urban Interface) in northern California, had to flee their home with their go-bags as a fire got to within a couple of miles of their house. I watched things unfold in real time on wildfire Twitter and WatchDuty, and was able to do… nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Daybreak

But maybe I could, in fact, do something about these sources of stress and fear. I began to wonder. I read a lot more about climate change that summer, and realized that we already know what to do, and how to do it, and are doing it, but we are just not doing any of it fast enough. I went through some really Big Feelings about this…I flickered between hope and rage, in equal measure. I also had to face the hard fact that most of the time, new scientific research, the thing I’d based my entire career on producing, is not really the limiting factor preventing action most of the time.

But as I read and thought, I realized that I could use my skills and knowledge in new ways. I could go help bend those tech adoption curves upwards and cost curves downward. Or I could help scale the excellent, abundant science that already exists.

Realizing that most of my work didn’t really matter much was freeing. It opened me up to more broadly consider the problems that mattered most, and solutions that could make the biggest impact. I cared about nature, obviously, but also climate. And digging deeper, under both concerns lay my deep concern for the well-being of people, my own tiny human but also everyone else. Human thriving is underpinned by healthy nature and climate conditions.

In the clear light of day

My next step was to learn a lot, very quickly. Luckily, that’s something I am good at and enjoy. First, I took stock of the system I wanted to enter. I worked to develop a high-level understanding of the systems’ components, relationships, and relative importance— what are the most impactful climate change and nature solutions ,and the biggest barriers to enactment? What was my “theory of change” around climate and nature (bottlenecks, tipping points, non-linear dynamics, etc.)? I did a lot of Big Picture readings, from the Drawdown Review, books like Speed & Scale, All We Can Save, Saving Us, and various syntheses and reports. And of course, since this was the 2020’s, I listened to a lot of podcasts, including Volts, Catalyst, and many more.

My biggest source of inspiration during this time was connecting with other people. I had deep, sustaining conversations with friends and in-network colleagues working in climate, tech, and the environmental movement. From there, I worked my way outwards by asking “who should I talk to next?” and “what should I be learning about or reading?”. All of this was done in secret, because any whiff of my uncertainty would have sunk my tenure prospects faster than you can say “CV.”

But I kept going, stealthily and steadily. Connections yielded more connections. I also got a lot more strategic, prioritizing conversations with people who’d already done the knowledge synthesis in problem/solution areas I found really exciting. Learning from these “synthesizers” was a huge efficiency gain.

I also signed up for a lot of job-oriented newsletters and job boards, and curated the heck out of my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds so that I was following along with “thought leaders” and the ebb and flow of big ideas. Soaking it all in, I metabolized the professional language, constellation of characters, and job descriptions that actually resonated with me. I hadn’t written a resume since undergrad, but by the winter of 2021, I had a new resume and much shinier LinkedIn page.

Reading the Impact Sundial

One of the biggest questions I faced, once I’d wrapped my head around the problems and their potential solutions, was where to focus my career search. Should I lean into my skills, my disciplinary knowledge, or maybe both? Like the true nerd that I am, I did a lot of list-making and mapping. My skills were creativity, ideas generation, data analysis, research design and synthesis, technical writing, project and people management, strategic planning, collaboration, visual display of data/design, and science communication. Conversely, my disciplinary strengths at the time spanned wildlife habitat relationships, social-ecological systems, and population and predator-prey dynamics (although my knowledge areas are a lot broader now).

I decided to try to stay at least adjacent to my discipline, because this felt like the way I could most rapidly make impact at scale. This led me to concentrate on opportunities within nature-based solutions, and where nature and climate tech intersect.

Even narrowed down like this, there was still so much to contemplate. I did a lot of paying attention to my feelings as I moved forward: when was I uncomfortable or worried? When was I excited and motivated? I also started to classify organizations by impact. The pace, energy and growth potential of start-ups really spoke to me, as well as their openness to new ideas. However, the advantages of established, high-impact non-profits was also appealing, because even if they are slower to decide on a course of action, they have the machinery in place to make change happen and stay the course.

I finally felt ready to launch the next phase of my career. I knew it could be either at a highly-effective non-profit with a well-proven theory of change, or a rapidly-growing start-up, where innovation and scalability are both prioritized. I knew I wanted the work to be in the nature-based solutions space, or where nature and climate solutions touch, and that it should be grounded in helping people. I also wanted it to be remote, so my family didn’t have to move and my husband could continue in his tenured professor role.

Critically, I was able to let go of the idea of doing an exhaustive search for the ideal “forever” job, and also to get over the scarcity mindset of academia. I accepted that I will probably do multiple jobs during the remainder of my career, and so there is no need to find the “perfect” job. I also accepted that I probably wouldn’t be “transforming” anything as a single individual. Instead, I needed to find a good bucket for my marginal “drops” of contributions.

Impact is a moving target, and that’s fine

In spring of 2022, I finally quite my tenured job in academia (fittingly, the article about this experience, in the journal Nature, is paywalled). I joined a small startup, the Natural Capital Exchange (NCX). It was a massive culture shock, in a good way. The pace was blistering, the teamwork deep, and the people creative, passionate, and impact-oriented. I loved it. I could unpack what happened there in a whole other post (what can go wrong with nature-based carbon credits, and why there is so little investment in nature via voluntary mechanisms, deserves many more words than I can give it here). But a year later, I’d experienced my first RIF (reduction in force), along with 50% of my co-workers, as NCX pivoted from carbon credits to helping landowners match with ecosystem payment programs.

This was my first experience with layoffs, and it triggered all my cravings for stability. But I ended up making peace with job impermanence, and moving one step closer to comfort with change. After getting laid off at NCX, I felt much more wary of venture capital as a good funding match for nature-oriented solutions, since it is just very hard to be a 10X growth “unicorn” in this realm. Nature’s materials underpin our entire economy. There are a lot of business models built on its extractive use, but much fewer built on its repair and stewardship. It’s going to be a slower slog, with more companies and solutions, than most other forms of tech. We need a whole pack-train of nature-tech mules, or even herds of zebras, but instead many are run into the ground by unrealistic growth expectations or never foaled at all (again, fodder for a whole different article).

Nevertheless, I jumped at the opportunity to join Vibrant Planet. Another VC-backed startup, VP felt as though it had a strong business model and was getting some good traction and scale. VP’s platform aimed to streamline wildfire risk mitigation at scale. The planning process is currently a huge bottleneck to reducing wildfire risk, with mitigation projects taking years to make their way through the complex system. An online planning platform could accelerate impact by reduced planning time and burden while optimizing solutions based on users’ actual values (water, wildlife, assets, safety, recreation… ecosystems are complex). While I was there, we worked with big collaborative groups with many stakeholders, including the Calfire, USFS, BLM, the Nature Conservancy, local orgs and agencies, Tribes, etc.. I spent two great years there, working to develop science partnerships and bring biodiversity science into the decision platform in fast yet rigorous ways, and learned an enormous amount about collaboration, decision-making, and building tech platforms.

But then things changed, yet again. In 2025, I watched as federal actions on forest management and the wildfire crisis slowed and stalled. The acreage treated last year for hazardous fuels by the Forest Service was down 40% , compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, wildfire costs continue to escalate, and are torching state budgets. Luckily, Vibrant Planet has succeeded, despite the federal headwinds, and I’m hopeful that federal agencies will ramp up wildfire mitigation again someday, ideally with a better permitting and action system in place. But I decided that I was ready to go work on fixing the system in a different way, in the interim. Luckily, by this time I was much more comfortable with change, and approached my next move with a lot less anxiety.

That’s when I made the leap to my current position at PERC (the Property and Environment Research Center), a non-profit that does research, pilot projects, and policy. This “chain of change” really excited me— we ground our ideas in the best available economic and ecological data and research, pilot innovative new incentive programs ourselves, and then work to change policy so that proven systems for better incentives can be applied more broadly, and bottlenecks to positive action can be removed. And land owners and stewards are at the center of how we see things working and changing, not the periphery. I’ve gotten to bring my passion for building more habitat for humans and non-humans alike (“conservation abundance”) to my work, and look forward to continuing to grow these ideas, in collaboration, so we can fix our broken systems.

I’m now so much more comfortable with change, for myself and in our broader society and systems. As George Bernard Shaw said:

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

I’d love to hear about your own change journeys. What did you want to change, and why? How did you overcome inertia and jump into something new? Are you standing on the edge, contemplating a change?

In the first case, officials from the South Coast Air Quality Management District took heed of the apparent massive groundswell of resistance and rejected the cleaner new air standard before realizing they’d been conned. In the second, officials figured out what was going on before decision time. And in the future, there will be a lot more situations like this, as people who want to stop projects learn to wield the power of AI agents more deftly.

As somebody who really wants to see government work better and faster to enable more good things to be built by both the private and public sector, this AI astroturfing scares me a lot. That’s because one of the biggest barriers to doing things is the need to secure a permit, and our current permitting system favors objectors. Want to build a house or apartment? You’ll need a permit. Want to install solar on your roof, or build a new wind farm? You’ll need permits for both of those, too. What about thinning overgrown forests to reduce wildfire risk, or restoring a degraded stream? Yep, you guessed it, permit needed, and delays expected (see below).

To be clear, permitting— a standard way to decide which projects should be allowed— is good and necessary. It’s how we can prevent industrial factories spewing toxic chemicals next to schools and houses, bulldozed wetlands, and clearcut old-growth forests.

But way too often, the way we decide which projects should be allowed is to ask, “did they follow the right procedures?” rather than “is this project good for society, after weighing the costs and benefits?” This so-called proceduralism has always been inefficient for all and exploitable by special interests. But now, advancing AI seems poised to supercharge its problems, likely derailing good projects at scale unless we fix proceduralist processes ASAP.

The long path that projects must follow makes it extremely vulnerable to AI disruption. There are many points where NIMBYs and other objectors can use public comments, lawsuits, or both to slow or veto projects, even if those projects are net beneficial to society and have widespread public support. And with the rise of AI agents, faking public comments and legal documents is now much faster and cheaper.

In response, project applicants and regulators will try to keep up by using their own AI tools to speed up processes, but I fear they will fail, or at best, keep pace with the objectors in a new equilibrium. We already see this uneven playing field in our current system, in the power that objectors have over our system.

This AI permitting arms race is already well underway. Project applicants can now use AI platforms with names like CivCheck and CiviScreen to pre-review their projects, screening them for potential problems (which creates risk of denial or litigation). Many regulatory agencies have some sort of AI modernization effort, from automatically classifying public comments and drafting responses to more fully automated review processes, and abundance-oriented groups are working frantically to help this tech-enabled streamlining.

But the objectors are also innovating, and quickly. In the UK, Objector.ai and its competitors are allowing objectors to produce torrents of comments and automatically review project documents and compare them to statutes to identify potential legal complaints. And as played out in SoCal, the same dynamic has also started to show up in the US in AI astroturfing campaigns, where tens of thousands of comments are allegedly being submitted by AI software without the knowledge or consent of those named as the commenters.

Only time will tell whether the various pile-ons of AIs at various points in our clunky current system will push down on the procedural accelerator or brakes faster. Given that new legal requirements are springing up on the regulator side for humans to be a part of the review system, while there is no clear legal accountability for AI forgery on the objector side, I’m betting that the objectors will win this race, at least in the short term. The Tyranny of the Complainers, as Alex Tabborak writes, is hard to overturn without system change.

I’m sure you could see where I was going with this. Maybe, just maybe, waiting to see who wins an AI proceduralist permitting arms race is not not our best option. If you know your company’s software system has a vulnerability, and wasn’t working that well before anyway, why wait to see if the hackers or the IT team will win, if you could instead switch to more secure software? A far more lasting and elegant solution to the AI-supercharging of proceduralism is to fix proceduralism itself.

This is easier said than done, as we can see from the last five years of failed legislation aimed at “permitting reform.” Proceduralism is woven into our governing institutions and proposed solutions widely and bipartisanly, as Nick Bagley so eloquently writes in “The Procedure Fetish,” and politicians and interest groups are reluctant to change it, because it can be used to say no to projects that threaten their interests.

The most famous proceduralist law in the US in NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, passed in 1969 as an attempt to reduce environmental impacts. This is a massive simplification, but NEPA requires review of major federal actions “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” It basically says that when the government wants to do a project, they have to disclose the project’s expected impacts and take public feedback, before deciding which project to do. The goal of NEPAother proceduralist rules is to inform the public and in so doing surface hidden project impacts and alternatives.

But what it doesn’t require is that the lowest-impact alternative be selected, or that negative impacts be mitigated. If it did, it would be a substantial rather than procedural law (like the Clean Air Act). Many fans of doing more good things, in the Abundance Movement and beyond, want to reform or replace proceduralist statutes with substantive ones for this very reason.

The baseline effect of a procedural regulation like NEPA is a time-tax on all projects, since they must all follow the procedures, with added time taxes on projects where there is potentially strong opposition or large negative impacts (in NEPA’s case, on the environment).

First, on top of the baseline time-tax of following the procedure, project applicants must prepare longer disclosure documents when environmental or other regulated impacts are expected to be larger or more complex. In this case, the time tax scales up with the expected impact, incentivizing avoidance or reduction of project impacts. That basically makes sense: tax what you want less of, in this case, negative environmental impacts (but see Thomas Hochim’s piece at Green Tape for how this can fail).

But just disclosing impacts can’t explain why, for projects requiring an Environmental Impact Statement, the most in-depth type of disclosure, this process now takes years and hundreds or even thousands of pages, when this didn’t used to be the case. That’s because there is a second time tax: project applicants prepare lengthier disclosure documents when they expect large-scale objections, to hedge against litigation risk. Objectors can litigate if they can show that all impacts were not disclosed, so over-disclosure is the norm. The resulting time tax is de-coupled from the expected environmental impacts, instead scaling with litigation risk. For example, as argues, a handful of environmental groups are responsible for the vast majority of objections, painting the entire environmental movement as obstructionist. Likewise, savvy, unsavory interest group with no environmental mission whatsoever can still wring concessions from a project applicant via “greenmail”, with no apparent penalties.

This triple time tax has made doing anything that requires a permit under a proceduralist environmental law, like NEPA or CEQA (the National Env. Policy Act and California Env. Quality Act) much slower and more expensive. It also probably makes people just not even try to do some projects at all, although that “avoided ambition” is harder to detect.

And now, here comes AI, supplying a bottomless pool of free, quasi-expert labor. The triple time-tax could rapidly escalate as AI super-charging project opponents’ ability to object, as early evidence suggests. What can be done?

Most popular proposals to fix proceduralist permitting are tweaks rather than all-out replacements, modifying one of the triple time taxes in some way to make preferred projects cheaper. But how do these fixes hold up, under the assumption of AI augmentation of objectors, regulators, and applicants? Here are five basic buckets of proposed reforms, and their AI opportunities and vulnerabilities, as I see them.

1. Increase exemptions from proceduralism for preferred project types.
   This is the most popular fix I see proposed. Maybe AI produces a net gain for the project applicant and regulator sides, relative to the objector side, since they could maybe more quickly determine if a project meets criteria for a categorical exemption or exclusion. But this only benefits preferred project types, and the baseline, universal time-tax remains.

2. Increase efficiency of procedures themselves to reduce the cost
   My organization, PERC, and many others have been pushing to limit attorney fees, cap review times, etc., for many years. This set of fixes is pretty exposed to AI from the objector, applicant, and regulator sides, since it’s a version of the status quo. I anticipate arms race dynamics, with very uncertain net outcomes for projects getting done.

3. Move to permissive environmental regulations
   This means disallowing specific harms, and the government needing to detect and enforce the law, like traffic laws. This more libertarian fix is pretty immune to AI objections, but also to make this work, it’s going to be very tempting for the regulators to use AI to detect illegal harms. That feels scary, in a Big Brother kind of way, and related to the ongoing broader conversations around the use of AI in law enforcement.

4. In-lieu fee payments to escape proceduralism
   Basically, project applicants pay for expedited permitting. This lets project applicants and regulators escape AI-enhanced objections, but only for those wealthy enough to pay. AI objections that raise time taxes might increase the incentives to pay-to-escape, making these programs more appealing to more project applicants.

5. Move to substantive environmental regulations (allow mitigable harms via permit; polluter pays to mitigate harms; e.g., US wetlands policy but more nature types, UK Biodiversity Net Gain policy). This is my personal favorite, because we finally get away from proceduralism to substantive policy where costs scale with environmental harms in a predictable, fair (and hopefully much faster) way. AI objections have a much reduced potential effect here, because there are not as many veto points. Impact assessment can be standardized, based on statistical models augmented with field data when necessary, which AI could actually help with a lot, boosting both the project applicant and regulator sides.

I hope we can find the political will to reform federal and state permitting rules that is time-taxing all projects, good and bad. As Marc Levitt points out in , NEPA itself has become murky, stripped back to its primordial state by recent court decisions. Understanding the looming AI risks to our current system could be further motivation to getting real reform done. I also hope that we think hard about how our proposed fixes might themselves be vulnerable, or improvable, with AI, or we might find ourselves in an even worse spot in a few years, with failed fixes and eroded political will to try again.

Note: a huge thank-you to Tate Watkins and Jonathan Wood at PERC, and at EPIC, for thoughtful feedback and input to refine these ideas.

Spoiler: cougars are a massive, secret conservation success story, and they also provide humans with weird, unexpected benefits, like saving lives and preventing property damage by reducing deer-vehicle collisions.

If you’ve hiked a lot in the western US, there’s a decent chance you’ve been close to a cougar but just don’t know it. That’s because they are incredibly secretive, and have one of the lowest attack and fatality rates on humans of any big cat (although they’re very effective at preying on deer and other wild mammals, as well as livestock and sometimes pets).

They are also pretty tolerant of people— look no farther than the populations living in California’s coastal mountains above Santa Cruz. There, researchers found the big cats avoid humans, but still managed to feed, move, and reproduce successfully.

But the eastern US has been devoid of cougars for many decades, with the exception of the Florida Panther (a smaller and endangered sub-species of cougar occurring only in certain parts of Florida). So why has it been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 1973, the year the law took effect?

A 2011 review by the US Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that eastern cougars were already extinct. Then in 2014, they filed an initial de-listing proposal and took public comments (hundreds of people have reported sightings of eastern cougars. They were mostly golden retrievers). And because of the glacial pace of bureaucratic processes, it’s taken until now, 15 years later, for them to finally be de-listed.

This decision is probably good for the future of cougars east of the Mississippi. Without ESA protection, state wildlife agencies will be able to flexibly manage any cougars that do successfully re-colonize, including responding to conflict with people, pets and livestock. It will also make it more likely that locals will support a re-introduction, since having an endangered species on your property greatly limits what you can do there, making them pretty unpopular as neighbors for some people. Quite a few re-introduction efforts for endangered species have been slowed down by decades, or failed outright for this exact reason. So-called “experimental populations”, a designation under the endangered species act meant to make management more flexible for re-introduced populations of threatened or endangered species, can help with the perception and reality problem for local people, but are not a silver bullet.

So, what are their chances? While cougars are slowly re-colonizing patches of suitable habitat in the Midwest, human populations and road networks are much denser in the east. Is it even possible for cougars to live in such a human-modified landscape? Can they get there on their own, if so? And how might they impact humans, positively and negatively, if they get there?

A research paper by Dr. Mark Elbroch of Panthera, made the case for returning cougars to viable habitat in the east. He and his co-authors reviewed the literature and aggregated expert opinion to identify key variables that determine cougar habitat suitability: land needed to not be agriculture, be mostly covered by forest, not have too deep of snow, have moderate to low housing density, and not be right next to a major road.

They also factored in human-wildlife conflict, by excluding any areas with high livestock densities where the big cats would be likely to get into trouble and be lethally removed by wildlife managers as a result. They found 13 suitable habitat areas that met these criteria and were at least 10,000 square kilometers (big enough for cougars to roam), across the Upper Midwest, Ozarks, New England, and Appalachia.

While cougars could eventually get there on their own, likely by hooking north via Manitoba and then down from eastern Canada, it might take a very long time if it happens at all. That’s why there is a strong case to be made for giving them a helping hand, and not just from a conservation perspective.

Cougars and other top carnivores can have some big benefits for society, including reducing the negative impacts of over-abundant prey like white-tailed deer. These “predation services” of cougars and other top predators are an area I’ve researched, along with collaborators. Using predator-prey population models, we found that if cougars recolonized the eastern US, they could reduce deer-vehicle collisions by 22% within 30 years. Based on data from South Dakota, we estimated that cougars are already saving around $1 million per year by preventing deer-vehicle collisions.

And that’s not factoring in other benefits cougars could have, like increased success of tree seedlings planted by foresters and browsed by deer, enhanced forest biodiversity (because over-abundant deer simplify forest structure and foodwebs), and maybe even carbon sequestration (because over-abundant deer reduce plant biomass and can impact below-ground carbon as well).

But of course, top carnivores like cougars also have real costs to humans living alongside them, from depredation of pets and livestock, to fewer deer for hunters and wildlife watchers to enjoy, to the fear that many people feel just knowing that there are cougars out there. And every now and then, people are attacked and even killed by cougars, although such instances are rare.

These risks make people less tolerant of the big cats, impacting the likelihood of success for recolonizing populations whether that process is natural or assisted by humans. But promisingly, a recent survey of rural residents in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and West Virginia showed strong support for cougar re-introduction, including among hunters, with ratios of support varying from 4:1 to 13:1, depending on the state. A key next step will be figuring out how to increase tolerance for remaining locals in opposition, who can disproportionately affect public discourse and conservation outcomes, even when in a minority.

Quantifying all of the costs and benefits to understand the “net effect” of predators and their ecosystem services and disservices for people is hard. But if we want to restore fully-functioning ecosystems, complete with top carnivores to regulate them, we will need to take into account the true costs of living alongside them and mitigate these costs for those impacted. This means design and implementation of new forms of conservation finance so we can pay people for tolerating and providing habitat for a big, scary, and sometimes damaging cat in their neck of the woods. It also means facing hard situations, where lethal removal of a high-conflict cougar may be the best option. And the recent de-listing of the ghost of cougars past makes all of these management options much easier.

For me, there is no thicker or better thicket than how we can better steward nature, and also why we don’t. It’s on my mind as we approach Earth Day, but also most other days as well. We are breaching planetary boundaries of sustainability for water, biodiversity, and a livable climate with abandon. And there are solutions, tested and successful ones, for reducing and repairing our damage to nature, which we are choosing not to implement. We can do impact assessment using dynamic baselines, follow the mitigation hierarchy using the principles of like-for-like ecological equivalence to achieve no-net-loss… Okay, I’ll stop now.

These technocratic terms of art are my love language. But I recognize that they lack a certain… charisma. Here’s why I love them anyway, why they might represent our best shot at a system for fixing nature, why they might just be too boring to try, and how we can give them a little more ‘riz.

Under their boring bureaucratic shell, these words are all part of the idea of compensatory nature mitigation, which is an elegant framework for making things right when we cause harm. And it’s been very successful, when we’ve tried it. The U.S.’s wetland mitigation program, created by the Clean Water Act, is the oldest and best-studied example, and the UK’s new Biodiversity Net Gain Policy is perhaps the most ambitious attempt at applying the idea at scale. But the way we obfuscate the powerful core idea underneath layers of deeply dull language makes it hard to love, even on Earth Day. As a case in point, here’s how one of the world’s premiere scientific bodies, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, describes this transformative approach:

“The mitigation hierarchy intends first to avoid, to the greatest extent possible, predicted impacts on biodiversity, then to minimise losses that could not be avoided, and place damaged areas under restoration. Biodiversity offsets are the last resort in the mitigation hierarchy, to counterbalance any residual losses that remain. The goal of the mitigation hierarchy is to achieve no net loss or a net gain of biodiversity” ~ The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

Yawn. This is, objectively, intensely boring to read, and if you got through it all, you’ve certainly earned a cookie. Yet the underlying principles of justice, fairness and responsibility are bedrock human interests, across time and societal structures. One of the first lessons we teach our children is reciprocity towards other people. To fix what we break, apologize when we injure, ask before we take, and give thanks when we receive a gift. The high-pitched, righteous wail of “no fair!” has pierced parental eardrums since children first played.

Not that it’s easy to apologize, repair, ask permission, and be thankful— as an adult, I still struggle with all of these. But I know that abiding by this behavioral code of reciprocity is the key to healthy, sustainable relationships. And when I see somebody regularly failing to do so, it’s a giant, red flashing warning. Wiiii-oooo, jerk alert!

In many if not all indigenous cultures, this reciprocal code for good relationships was and is extended to the non-human world as well. It was notably articulated by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her recent book “The Serviceberry” so that nice white ladies who love nature, like me, could read what indigenous folks have known since time immemorial in a tidy package. And this code, which she terms “the Honorable Harvest,” is the opposite of boring:

“We humans must consume, since we are animals to whom the gift of photosynthesis was not given. But our patterns of gross over-consumption have brought us to the brink of disaster. What would it be like to consume with the full awareness that we are the recipients of earthly gifts, which we have not earned? To consume with humility? We are called to harvest honorably, with restraint, respect, reverence, and reciprocity”

Did you just get a shiver reading that? I know I did. And this code for an Honorable Harvest was, for a long time, self-enforcing. We' forget the truly enormous stakes of poor ecosystem management today, when we can glibly shunt most of our environmental externalities (another technocratic term, which just means the harms we do to nature that are not paid for within the economy via prices) to somebody else’s backyard via global supply chains.

But when the local ecosystem is your source for almost everything that matters, and trade supplies luxuries rather than the majority of your family’s calories, to violate the code is to risk scarcity and starvation. In short, failing to steward nature was deeply dangerous. And as we are learning, it still is. Even far-away environmental destruction eventually comes home to roost, via our shared atmosphere, oceans, and global climate system.

The existential risks from over-consumption within ecosystems are why the code for the Honorable Harvest goes into quite a lot of detail, far beyond a fluffy Western “take care of nature” Earth Day message. In fact, reading these twelve clear directives, I was reminded of… the mitigation hierarchy. (you knew I’d get back there to my thickest nerdom thicket, didn’t you?). Ok, also a little bit of the ten commandments. But those, unfortunately, don’t say anything about nature stewardship (although the Book of Genesis does, and is well articulated by the Creation Care movement).

Back to the thicket! Bear with me here. Basically, compensatory nature compensation is the idea that we know that some of our actions harm nature, and that we should avoid what harm we can and pay back the rest, with interest, by following what’s called “the mitigation hierarchy”. To me, that’s also structural to the pillars of the Honorable Harvest. Which got me thinking, can we actually map these concepts of nature care to one another? What, if anything, is not represented from the Honorable Harvest in the mitigation hierarchy? And, crucially… is what is missing part of why “compensatory mitigation” feels so dry and boring to (most) people, outside of my fellow nature nerds? Ok, here goes. Into the woods, and let’s count the trees.

What I found was that a surprising number of Honorable Harvest ideas do crosswalk well. Project impact assessment requires knowing the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them. Deciding if a harm to nature from a project is mitigable involves asking for permission and abiding by the answer, and not taking unsustainable amounts from nature. Following the mitigation hierarchy is being accountable as the one taking something from nature. And the steps of the mitigation hierarchy itself map conceptually as well: avoiding impact is taking only what you need, minimizing is harvesting in a way that minimizes harm, and restoring and offsetting is giving a gift of reciprocity for what you have taken. Achieving net gain, that final, crucial step if we are to restore our crumbling ecosystems, is sustaining the ones who sustain you, so that the earth will last forever.

Is the mitigation hierarchy’s charisma problem simply a language problem, then? In part. The words of the Honorable Harvest are clear and directive, with a refreshing moral reasoning baked into them. Taking a life, asking for permission, abiding by nature’s answer, these are all the language of healthy relationships, and firmly establish natural entities as other beings with rights that can answer back and demand accountability. We can see this same indigenous non-human rights framing gaining ground in the Rights of Nature legal movement. Not surprisingly, this relational, moral framing is much more galvanizing than “don’t take too many cookies from the cookie jar, and replace the cookies you take.” Cookies don’t fight back if you mess up, and I don’t feel gratitude to cookies that I eat, or an obligation to bake more cookies to replace them. Nor do I feel a compunction about taking too many, even if it’s the last one, other than how it will affect the fit of my pants or that it might make my family members mad.

In contrast, as somebody who hunts elk and deer to feed my family, I can attest to the deep sense of meaning and thankfulness that I experience after harvesting an animal, and while processing it and then eventually cooking and serving it to my family. Elk, and the wonderful habitat that sustains them, are certainly not cookies. That experience of taking from nature directly drives home the Honorable Harvest code instinctively and powerfully for me.

And yet we still teach our children that nature and people are separate, and that nature is an object we hold dominion over rather than a subject we hold relational obligations with. When we ascribe to nature any feelings at all, it is within an implicit hierarchy of moral relevance, and is never on the same level of responsibility as to our fellow humans. I do this too — I teach my children to be grateful to the elk, but not to the potato and broccoli plated beside it, or the soil they grew in.

These are thorny questions to grapple with, and perhaps distracted you from the fact that there are three Honorable Harvest directives that are missing from my mapping attempt. They are a big omission, and I think they just might explain part of the dry-as-dust boringness of compensatory mitigation. These missing pieces are all about reverence: how you must conduct yourself to be worthy of the gift:

This tripartite call to be reverent is powerful, and difficult, and deeply personal. And this is why I think it is the essential missing ingredient from our compensatory mitigation framework for nature repair.

In our modern world, the other three pillars, respect, restraint and reciprocity, are all outsourceable to someone or something else via technology and bureaucracy. And in some ways, that feels like an advantage — reducing friction should in theory make it easier for people to adoptthem, if we ever got around to implementing compensatory nature mitigation in the first place. First, the regulatory permitting process outsources respect and restraint, taking the decision about what projects and how much harm to nature are allowable out of the project developer’s hands and giving that discretion to agency staffers instead. Then, reciprocity is outsourced via the mitigation hierarchy process, as in-lieu fee payments or purchases of credits via advanced mitigation banking make nature repair to restore and offset harms a simple, fast financial transaction. But reverence… reverence is not a part of the regulatory process at all. It is an internal state, which by definition cannot be outsourced.

Thinking about the potential importance of internalized versus outsourced obligations towards nature, I can’t help circling back to what we teach our children, and boredom. My eldest son, who is five (or rather, almost six!) describes a great many things as “boring,” including almost anything frustrating and difficult that he doesn’t want to do (things he wishes did not apply to him), and subjects that are beyond his current interests and understanding (things he believes do not apply to him). Perhaps it is this failure to make us personally involved and responsible, via these missing components of reverence, that make the mitigation hierarchy so boring. Nature is great, but repairing it is not my problem, and somebody else will handle it, no change needed on my part. The technocratic terms certainly don’t help the mitigation hierarchy’s boringness problem. But without this necessary call to personal change and responsibility, is the mitigation hierarchy doomed to be boring no matter its word choice?

Perhaps boring is fine. After all, the UK managed to implement a mandatory biodiversity compensation law that is quite dull to read and asks very little of most of the public, although it is very exciting to the nature nerds among us, over a process that spanned decades. But I fear that as long as we outsource needed nature repair without repairing our own beliefs, we may never get to sustainability. We are often not using the gifts of nature wisely and gratefully, but instead wastefully. No amount of mitigation can make up for wanton waste and over-consumption. It is always harder and more expensive to repair something than to not break it in the first place.

It feels overwhelming to think about restoring a sense of reverence towards nature’s gifts into our tech-addled, attention-strip-mined, cynical and often modern lives. But also, deeply exciting to try. Perhaps tonight’s the night our family will start thanking the potatoes and the broccoli, not just the elk. And on Monday, I’ll keep pushing forward towards bringing nature repair via compensatory nature mitigation out of the thickets and into the mainstream.

Twenty years later, as the world topped 7 billion people, I was walking in Ehrlich’s footsteps, training to become an ecologist. As a PhD student, I studied the limitations of deer populations in Alaska by fitting female deer and their fawns with GPS collars and tracking their movements, births, and deaths over multiple years. One particularly bad winter, I watched dozens of deer fawns that I’d radio-collared and monitored since birth starve. I’d trek out into the dark, snowy spruce forest, floating on top of the chest-deep snow thanks to my snowshoes, after hearing via radio signal that a fawn’s collar had stopped moving (usually a surefire indicator that they’d died). Earlier in the winter, I’d often find them still alive but trapped by the snow in areas with limited food and too many deer. By spring, time and lack of food had done their work, and almost nine out of every ten fawns I’d collared were dead. Watching these animals that I’d known since birth die this way was existentially painful. Hunger is a bad way to go.

Since then, much of my career in wildlife conservation has been spent trying to understand what limits wild animal populations, with answers varying from climate to human killing to predators, disease, and food supplies. And there’s always a limit of some kind — the brutal logic of the natural world is inescapable. In this way, Ehrlich, who recently died at 93 years old after a lifetime as an ecologist and public intellectual, was correct.

But over time, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by Ehrlich’s cultural legacy, manifested in conservation biology’s scarcity mindset. The barely-submerged focus on human population as the driver of conservation problems constricts our imagining of conservation solutions. So many logic chains in the environmental movement seem to involve a step that caps resources that humans need (like stopping housing growth), with the implied goal of stabilizing or reducing human populations, at least locally, so that nature can prosper. Essentially, the conservation movement believes that humans are like all other animals in that our population can only be limited by extrinsic factors like food and shelter (essentially, human habitat), not by our own wise choices. And in nature, and through most of human history, this holds true — a population with finite habitat would be stable, not growing, and many human populations and civilizations have collapsed due to resource limitations.

But even if we could block creation of new human habitat to cap our population size, we shouldn’t want to. As any good ecologist or human historian would tell you, what is natural can also be horrific. Who would want us to be regulated, as we once were, by the “natural” processes of disease and famine? My time in the woods, with those hollow-eyed, bony little deer, is on my mind. Anyone brave enough to search the internet for photos and information about famines will recoil in horror. For anyone who has lived through food scarcity, I can only imagine, and am profoundly sorry. Indeed, the conjuring of the gruesome specter of famine in “The Population Bomb” was part of what captured the public’s imagination.

The opposite of famine is abundance, or at least, having enough. I crave conservation solutions that center “enoughness,” for people as well as non-human nature. Enough food, shelter, and community to live a good life. Habitat for all.

Is enoughness (or sufficiency, as researchers call it) possible for humans and non-humans alike? Thankfully, Ehrlich’s predictions of famine and other grizzly natural limits emerging for humans have failed to materialize so far at scale. Why? In my view, it’s because humans are unlike other animals in our capacious ability to imagine the future, think through the consequences of our actions, and invent and implement ingenious solutions (although as anyone watching current events unfold, we don’t always use those abilities to their fullest).

Using your incredible human imagination, picture this: a female deer looks around the leafy summer green of her forest home, sees a great many other deer browsing the shrubbery, and imagines the hunger of the coming winter. How would she respond, if she could see the mounting evidence of future hardship approaching, as humans can? I have no doubt that mother deer love their children. I’ve had one rise up and strike my face with her sharp hooves in fear and rage as I tried to weigh her fawn, still wet after birth. I’ve watched another circling, circling, circling the red-on-green bullseye in a meadow where her fawn was eaten by a bear, calling out for her baby. No loving mother wants to see her offspring starve. So, since we’re living in a wild hypothetical, I like to think our future-oriented deer would use her foresight to decide to take a birth-control pill, if it were available, rather than falling pregnant with twins as usual. That winter, there would be far fewer furred little bodies lying cold and and still under the snow.

Have humans used our gifts of foresight and invention wisely? Humans are not perfectly responsive to future risks, especially those with a long time horizon, as we can all see daily. For instance, we did not in fact follow my childhood math recommendations of one child per woman. In 2022, the world surpassed eight billion people. But population growth is slowing, and in many developed countries, fertility rates are already below replacement levels. In the US, population growth would already have been negative for several decades without immigration. Instead of famine and plagues reducing our numbers against our will, though, as Ehrlich and animal ecology would predict, study after study shows that increasing levels of education, healthcare, and opportunity, especially for women and girls, along with reproductive self-determination, have led to women choosing to have fewer children. Humans, it seems, have the foresight to limit themselves, when given the freedom to do so.

The failure of the population bomb to detonate does not mean that it is forever diffused, or that there are no natural limits to growth. Rather, it teaches us that the solution space to achieving “enoughness” is bigger than we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine within the conservation community. That’s part of why I’ve been so excited about bringing conservation and ecological expertise and thinking into the growing Abundance movement, and Abundance thinking into the environmental movement. Given the current energy crisis, this cross-pollination has never been more important. Crises, and the panic they provoke, cloud our foresight, making quick fixes to ease the pain appealing, and damage to nature in the name of energy independence easier to justify.

Nature is where all the goods and services that humans depend on originate, and it is indeed finite, degraded, and in desperate need of re-building. And although our ingenuity has allowed us to exceed perceived natural limitations again and again, from inventing synthetic fertilizers to defeating (at least until recently) a host of childhood diseases through vaccines, we ignore deteriorating nature at our peril. The earth’s stable climate system, within which human culture blossomed, is destabilizing faster than science predicted. The abundance of animal populations has halved in a matter of decades, reducing the resilience of ecosystems further. Clean water supplies are declining and at risk. These growing negative trends in ecosystem functions that humans depend on, which Ehrlich correctly predicted, are disturbing and ultimately inescapable.

Yet the instinct to fight against human habitat creation as a means to reduce local human populations and their impacts on nature, remains strong in parts of the environmental movement. And now, after decades of blocking housing projects for both environmental and social reasons, we may finally be seeing limits to human habitat yielding reduced population growth. More young people are citing a lack of “enoughness” — from insufficiently affordable housing, energy and healthcare to climate and political futures that lack stability— as reasons for choosing to not have children. But I see this as a tragedy, not a conservation victory, because there are better alternatives. It’s like choosing to starve ourselves, when there’s food on the table.

Instead, given human’s unique ability to limit our own population growth when enoughness is achieved, the humane answer is to build. We can build enough human habitat, while also considering and mitigating impacts to nature from building, and achieve enoughness for humans, who would use their resulting freedom and foresight to make wise choices about the size of their own families. We can also (re)build enough habitat for our non-human relatives, using the same movement and tools, so that their populations can regenerate. I want that world, where there’s enough habitat for all, human and non-human alike.

If you spend any time in today’s tech circles, you’ll inevitably hear about the so-called “adoption curve”. It’s one of those ideas where as soon as you’ve heard it, it feels obvious, but in fact was (and still is) revolutionary. The basic idea is that people have different levels of comfort with innovation, which affects how long it takes them to try something new. It’s invoked by tech CEOs and product managers alike and taught in business school, with statements like “we just need to drive our product along the adoption curve” and “we need to cross the adoption chasm as part of our go-to-market strategy using better customer segmentation.” And so on. Honestly, it often made me tune out back when I worked in tech start-up world, because it was just so ubiquitous.

But the adoption curve, and the over-arching field of “diffusion theory,” describing how ideas propagate through society, actually has agricultural roots. The inventor of this area of research was Everett Rogers, a professor at Iowa State University in the 50’s (who kept researching this area into the 2000’s! Here he is giving a lecture on diffusion theory in 2004) who studied how innovationn spread among the farming community. There is constant innovation in agriculture and a large number of farmers with varying temperaments (just like the rest of us), and so it shouldn’t be surprising that this was a great place to develop theories around ideas diffusion, but somehow we’ve lost track of technology innovation outside of the narrow, silicon-valley, software-as-a-service world. But back to Dr. Rogers and his big insight.

Studying how long it took farmers to try a new farming practice, he was struck by the variability in adoption, but also, by the repeated patterns. Some people just seemed psychologically more likely to try something new, again and again, while others were more resistant, and the distribution of their time-to-adopt across the farming community looked a lot like a normal “bell” curve, when plotted. This led him to classify people into different types of adopters, with some being “early adopters” who are excited to try out the next hot new thing, and others who take longer (the “early majority,” who wait for more evidence), or even longer (the “late majority”, who are quite skeptical of change but will try something once it’s become the new normal), or longer still, maybe to infinity (the so-called “laggards,” who may never try the innovation in question, even if everyone around them does, or may finally do it, but 20 years after everyone else).

I recently came back to the idea of the adoption curve in agriculture (and conservation, but we’ll get to that) while writing my first big report at my new job as a senior researcher at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). Our organization and many others have been looking for ways to bolster faltering wildlife migrations, one of the most important processes in nature, where birds, mammals, and some other organisms travel the same routes each year between widely separated seasonal ranges, in order to access better food, find mates, and reduce the risk of predators eating them and their young. These migrations are one of nature’s great spectacles, from wildebeest in Serengeti to arctic turns roving from pole to pole to pronghorn traversing across huge landscapes in the Western US). The migration routes they travel are also under threat from development and other encroaching human infrastructure (for instance, go learn about Deer 255 and her 200+ mile annual journey from Wyoming into Idaho each year, as catalogued by the Wyoming Migration Initiative). But these migration routes are often so long that they cross many types of land, including both public and private, and a lot of these lands are criss-crossed by barbed-wire fencing. There is so, so much barbed wire out there– it’s estimated that there is at least 620,000 miles of fencing in the western United States alone, enough to ring the earth more than 24 times. Why?

It turns out, barbed wire is one of the most impactful tech innovations in US history, and its hockey-stick growth curve would be the envy of any modern Silicon Valley investor.

It was an innovation born out of necessity. Following Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead act in 1862, settlers poured into the wide-open grasslands of the states west of the Mississippi, and found out quickly that it was really, really hard to farm there successfully. A big challenge was the problem of free-roaming livestock in the “open range”, which could decimate a hay or wheat crop in hours. Everyone let their livestock roam free, and while cowboys were useful in rounding them up and driving them to railroad access points to get to market, they were not out there stopping those livestock from eating people’s crops. What to do?

In response there were lots of folks experimenting with various sharp pointy things on fencing, but no commercially-viable product for a number of years. Finally though, an inventor and farmer named Joseph Glidden came up with a design that could scale. And once patented in 1874 and put into factory production (3 million pounds of barbed wire produced by the factory’s second year!), it exploded across the treeless expanse of the frontier in just two decades, disrupting culture, economics, and ecology in profound ways.

Homesteaders knew a good thing when they saw it, with one early salesman calling it “lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, and cheaper than dirt”. They could now rapidly fence their land to establish and defend new property rights, replacing cowboys acting as “human fences” (and not doing a very good job, from farmers’ perspectives) on the open range. Barbed wire made better boundaries and more profitable farming and ranching, increasing farmland values in the treeless West by an estimated 50 percent in the first decade of adoption and even affecting national GDP in those years. This was a technology so good that even the laggards were not lagging long.

In classic tech fashion, barbed wire moved fast, and while it fixed some things, it broke others. The ecological cost of barbed wire adoption was, and remains, huge. Native Americans called it the “devil’s rope” because of how it painfully entrapped and then slowly killed wide-ranging wildlife like bison, elk, deer, and pronghorn. Many animals still die tangled in its strands each year – Some, like the legendary Deer 255, will travel more than 200 miles, during which she may have to navigate fences (mostly barbed) more than 170 times. And crossing is risky — one study found that each year, a deer, elk, or pronghorn dies for every 2.5 miles of wire fence, mostly by becoming entangled in the top two wires, and juveniles are particularly vulnerable. Even when it’s not fatal, 40% of fence crossings were found to affect mule deer and pronghorn behavior in some way, which costs those animals energy they need for doing other things.

So, we saw this massively-successful ag technology, barbed wire, spread across the Western US and then other parts of the world, leaping along the adoption curve incredibly quickly and persisting as the dominant fence technology for the next 150 years, despite its conservation costs. That’s a pretty good run, in terms of sustaining market share– I’m sure if Google, Meta, and Apple et. al looked at that they’d eat their hearts out (sorry, iPhone, but I really think we’ll have something better by the year 2156). But maybe, just maybe, barbed wire’s reign is coming to an end. That’s because there’s a new disruptive fence technology in town, which requires no wires at all.

Virtual fencing is pretty cool (see above for how it works), and it’s spreading, although it has yet to leap the chasm from early adopters to the early majority. I feel confident it will do so, because its becoming the best economic and logistical option in a lot of places for a lot of ranchers. That emerging economic superiority is key. Physical fencing costs roughly $50,000 a year for a typical western cattle ranch. Virtual fencing costs are comparable, depending on stocking intensity and other factors—but it can also save time, improve forage utilization, and help find lost cows. When virtual fencing works for ranchers’ bottom lines, it becomes a conservation innovation that sells itself.

But I also think virtual fencing is “conservation tech,” not just ag tech, because of its potential conservation benefits. And to that end, conservation groups can play an important role in driving adoption faster, even if the underlying economic tailwinds are what will get us there in the end. How fast we get to full adoption really matters for conservation, especially for wide-ranging and migratory wildlife. From keeping cows out of creeks to reducing impacts to sage grouse and avoiding conflict with predators, it has huge potential. And there’s some even wilder stuff we could us it for someday, from a conservation perspective (VF collars on wolves to reduce livestock depredation, anyone? Sounds pretty far out there, but there were actually some successful-ish tests of this in the upper Midwest in the early oughts).

The tech that makes up virtual fencing keeps improving, and costs keep falling (I love learning and cost curves so much!). From my perspective, it’s time to scale, and I’d love for conservation organizations to help make this happen. It’s not just ag tech, it’s conservation tech. I wrote all about how this could happen in a recent “conservation roadmap” from PERC helps point the way, if anyone wants to dive deeper, and my thinking just kept coming back to the adoption curve, and how conservation organizations can help “bridge the chasms” of trust, economics, perceived efficacy, and risks.

It also has me thinking about other forms of “conservation tech” that exist, or could soon, and how these are different than the “nature tech” and “climate tech” spaces. To me, the difference is in direct application to solve a conservation problem. Nature tech feels very focused on collecting and modeling better biodiversity and ecosystem data, using innovations like bio-acoustics to camera traps, drone surveys, and eDNA. Likewise, climate tech is a broad category, but is focused specifically on increasing climate mitigation (like clean energy technologies, direct air capture of carbon using a bunch of different approaches, and even geo-engineering), with concessional sprinklings of adaptation (e.g., better spotting and response to wildfires that break out, alongside more fuel reduction treatments and home hardening). But conservation tech, like virtual fencing, feels separate to me, although obviously there are overlaps in these categories. Wildlife crossing structures. Electric fencing to keep bears out of orchards and chicken coops. Wildlife guardian dogs and range riders. Drones that monitor for poachers. These are all conservation technology, in some way, in that they are either new, or rediscovered old, innovations to reduce conflict and/or increase positive on-the-ground nature condition. They are all on their own journeys across the adoption curve, whether we are thinking of them that way or not.

Curious to hear what others think here. Is “conservation tech” its own category of innovation? Why don’t we talk about it this way very often in conservation world? What could we in conservation world learn about how to scale our efforts from diffusion theory and practice in other realms?

Currently, conservation/environmental NGOs are, like most other non-profits, “heterotrophs”, in terms of where they get their income. They depend on people and entities outside of themselves to infuse money into their operations, and this shapes their strategy, messaging, and ambitions.

Could conservation NGOs become “conservation autotrophs” instead, where renewable energy projects developed by the organization provide funding for their own conservation work, as plants photosynthesize their own energy from the sun? Some NGOs already do this, via the “social enterprise” funding model, but this is not a common strategy for conservation non-profits. And eco-voltaics, where solar panels co-occur with native plant restoration, are surprisingly cost-competitive for vegetation management under solar installations compared to grazing and turf-grass with mowing.

Here’s how it might work:

1. Buy degraded land close to grid interconnection opportunities

2. Build renewables, do restoration underneath (eco-voltaics)

3. Profit annually $

4. Use the $ to do more eco-voltaics projects on degraded land, plus other conservation stuff

5. Remove panels when worn out, resulting in net-improved ecological condition. Keep purchased land, or sell it with a conservation easement in place to finance yet more eco-voltaic conservation.

Thinking even more broadly, a conservation NGO could even build community solar or rooftop solar projects, and then use the profit $’s to do conservation elsewhere. Or team up with existing solar and housing non-profits to build human infrastructure where its needed, and pay for ongoing regeneration of natural infrastructure at the same time.

Conservation groups that already own land are perhaps the best positioned to take advantage of this “conservation autotroph” business model, but others could absolutely do this as well.

Conservation autotrophs would also have very different incentives and opportunities than conservation heterotrophs – being less beholden to donor interests, they could innovate at the leading edge of conservation practice, rather than cautiously following in the wake of shifting donor sentiment and government grant-making programs (the problems with the current conservation NGO incentive system are laid out elequently by here). Likewise, conservation autotroph NGOs could rapidly increase the footprint and positive perception of conservation, using renewables as a “money tree” umbrella, while also helping address climate change and energy affordability and security simultaneously.

Becoming a conservation autotroph would not make us independent of the social and ecological networks we all depend on, but rather, better and more reliable contributors. In my personal life, I seek to be a “grateful heteroptroph,” cultivating a sense of care and responsibility in how I relate to the land, where I get my food, and how I interact with my community. We are all dependent on other humans and on nature, whether we acknowledge it or not. But in an era of increasing funding and political insecurity, increasing financial self-reliance that can scale could take conservation to new places, with new security, creativity, and confidence. We can all be autotrophs now, at least in this one not-so-small way.

So, without further yammering, here is our paper! We hope it helps set the stage for great collaborations between the nature and conservation world, and those interested in building more of what people need, much faster. In a nutshell, here’s the basic idea:

• Conservation has long been a crisis discipline addressing issues of scarcity

• Society’s push to address housing and energy scarcity may oppose conservation’s goals, yet conservation typically fails when it challenges societal needs

• Science shows we can build renewable energy and housing with approaches that are neutral or positive for nature using new designs and by following the ‘mitigation hierarchy’

• We encourage conservation scientists, practitioners, and decision makers to collaboratively develop practices for building much-needed societal infrastructure that also advance conservation

Paper text:
The United States - and the world - is embarking on the largest land transformation of a generation as we strive to meet society’s immediate and growing needs for housing and energy. Our decisions about where and how to build this infrastructure will be massively consequential for nature’s and human well-being. Scientists and conservationists are needed to help society rapidly build much-needed energy and housing while also supporting nature.

Failure to rapidly build sufficient housing and energy will have ramifications for people, nature, and climate. Delayed housing construction will likely push development into poorly-planned sprawl that converts agricultural and natural lands and increases wildfire risk and habitat fragmentation (Greenberg et al. 2024). Similarly, a slower buildout of low-carbon energy, coupled with escalating energy demand from electrification and energy-intensive industries, can undermine grid stability, increase electricity costs, lead to power outages, and continue reliance on high-carbon energy (Klass et al. 2022). Doing so impacts nature and people through pollution and climate effects (Figure 1). Avoiding compounding issues for nature and society resulting from a limited supply of – and growing demand for – housing and energy requires increasing supply while avoiding, or even reversing, harm to the environment.

Figure 1. Development will have negative impacts to nature unless mitigated (A). High-carbon energy extraction and generation harms nature though habitat loss and climate change, leading to a cumulative expected impact (EI). Nature EI can be ameliorated by following the mitigation hierarchy and combining innovative renewable energy approaches. Doing so can avoid climate impacts, minimize climate and ecosystem impacts, restore on-site ecosystem value, offset ecological impacts off-site to achieve a ‘no net loss’ of nature, and restore conditions on- and off-site for nature ‘net gain’. Different solar photovoltaic (PV) designs (B) can merge land sharing and sparing approaches along the mitigation hierarchy.

If you are still reading, you must be a nature and abundance nerd as well. To read the rest of the pre-print, including what we think the full shape of the problem is and what the conservation community, especially researchers, should do about it, please click below. Happy nerding reading!

Read the Preprint PDF

After years of heightened inflation and sky-high housing and energy costs, one concept pervades American politics and culture today: the “affordability crisis.” The median age for a first-time home-buyer has climbed to an all-time high of 40 years old. Heating costs have risen by roughly 30 percent over recent years. Electricity costs are up, and rising numbers of Americans are facing debt collection over unpaid utility bills.

Affordability arguably sealed the outcome of the 2024 presidential election and seems to have influenced ballot-box results in November as well. But while I believe meeting human needs like houses and energy is critical, when I think about the need to provide more in the world, I also can’t help but think about fish—enormous fish.

At the heart of the affordability crisis is scarcity of built infrastructure, including housing, electricity transmission lines, and transit. There simply aren’t enough of the things that people need, so prices rise, encouraging supply to catch up to demand. But like infrastructure itself, much of the scarcity is manmade, created by a system of laws, policies, and norms that make it easy to slow or stop projects, and dampen the supply response of markets.

Likewise, a host of conservation challenges are also underpinned by scarcity. Only a century ago, for example, schools of Chinook salmon bigger than golden retrievers swam up the Columbia River. Somewhere between 10 and 16 million salmon and steelhead spawned in the Columbia Basin each year. Then, once dozens of dams were built along the Columbia and Snake Rivers for hydroelectric power—compounding overharvesting and habitat degradation from growing timber and agriculture industries—salmon populations crashed, and their size also dwindled. Today, just one to two million salmon and steelhead return to the Columbia annually, and hundred-pound salmon are unheard of. While economic analysis suggests net benefits would result from removing dams, concerns about reduced energy supplies and other costs of removal have repeatedly stalled action.

The opposite of scarcity is abundance—a topic that is top of mind in political and policy circles today. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their 2025 bestseller, Abundance, we can solve our problems of scarcity and build plentiful infrastructure by reforming land-use regulations, overhauling permitting processes, inventing new solutions, and harnessing other supply-boosting approaches. A growing, bipartisan abundance movement is gaining popularity, increasingly translated into real political power.

Many conservation challenges share similarly powerful “abundance” solutions with the affordability crisis. Much of the world’s “natural infrastructure”—the functioning ecosystems that provide clean water and air, fish and wildlife habitat, recreation opportunities, livestock forage, wood products, carbon storage, and more—is in need of rehabilitation. But as in the built world, our slow political and policy systems bog down projects that aim to rebuild or improve natural infrastructure—sometimes, they even favor constructing with concrete or steel over restoring forests or rivers. To take one example, a California project to restore riparian habitat needs more permits than an Alaskan oil pipeline. But that can change.

Traditionally, conservation strategies and tools have focused on a principle aim: reducing harm. And this approach has achieved much success by defending protected areas, regulating hunting, and guarding against habitat destruction. Spectacular national parks and massive rebounds of wild turkeys, white-tailed deer, and many other game species stand as testaments. But these defensive tools are not enough, as the ongoing global decline in habitat and biodiversity shows.

Conservation groups may see the abundance movement as a threat, because they fear giving up defensive regulatory tools as well as a massive loss of habitat to infrastructure. The risk is real. In the United States alone, over 30 million acres—more than 10 Yellowstone National Park’s worth—of natural areas and farmland could be converted into housing by 2040. The U.S. is expected to add 250,000 to 500,000 acres of new solar power generation, equivalent to roughly a Grand Teton National Park’s worth, per year between now and 2030. And this is not just a domestic problem. Globally, the amount of infrastructure is expected to double by 2030, transforming our planet.

The question facing our country and the world more broadly is not whether a massive amount of energy infrastructure and housing will be built, but where, how and when. And those are questions that conservationists can and should help answer. If conservation values and research can be included in siting, designing, and building more of what people need, then both nature and people will win.

By the same token, adopting an “abundance mindset” to tackle conservation challenges can help restore natural abundance in surprising ways. Here are five key principles that can help unlock the potential of abundance for humans and nature:

Dream big to restore habitat and species

In the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, salmon are still so plentiful that they fill creeks in late summer with a shining, rippling mass of fish. After spawning, the nutrients from the bodies of those salmon feed the entire ecosystem, growing massive riparian trees and a rich understory of plants, which in turn feed countless insects and birds. Wolves, bears, eagles, and many more creatures feed on those salmon directly. It’s an example of nature’s super-abundance, but it’s increasingly rare.

What if we could recover natural abundance elsewhere, and do so in ways that harness rather than impede the infrastructure abundance movement? Energy abundance for humans is an invitation to dream big for conservation. The return of plentiful, hundred-pound salmon to the Columbia River is possible if hydroelectric dams can be replaced by new sources of abundant energy. The Klamath River offers an example of what is possible. In 2024, a century after the construction of four major dams excluded salmon from the upper Klamath, the largest dam removal in U.S. history brought them down. The negotiations and eventual agreement and legislation needed to remove the dams took 14 years, following decades of conflict, and the permitting, demolition, and restoration took another four years. But just a day after the last dam debris was removed in October 2024, a salmon was detected swimming past the demolition site. A year later, Chinook salmon have returned over 300 miles upriver to spawn far upstream of the former dam sites, faster than biologists can keep up with monitoring. Recovery of natural abundance can be rapid, if we can get past the human choices and construction processes that are blocking it.

Include people and livelihoods in conservation

Durable conservation solutions must work for people, too, and we should create and seize opportunities to make more of these “win-wins” happen. In the western United States, if cheap energy can make and move more water where it is needed, then we might find peaceful resolutions to the “water wars.” The Colorado River, for example, has seen roughly 13 percent declines in supply of water in the past quarter-century due to a warmer, drier ecosystem, while overall consumption has held steady. Advances in desalination have the potential to boost the supply of drinking water for coastal cities, or even for inland areas with sufficient pipeline infrastructure. Fifty years ago, it took more than six times as much energy to desalinate seawater, and the technology continues to improve rapidly. Now, desalinating enough water for an average American household would take about half the energy that family uses for air conditioning. With abundant, cheap energy, the scenario goes from daunting to doable.

Increase incentives to build and maintain natural infrastructure

We desperately need to increase the supply of high-quality habitat, which remains the primary threat for most declining species worldwide. There are a growing number of proven, incentive-based tools to boost the supply of wildlife habitat, like paying ranchers for elk presence to reduce the costs of coexistence, compensating farmers to leave water in streams for trout, and sharing costs with ranchers to improve sage grouse habitat. But to unleash the power of incentives for conservation abundance, we need to increase financing in creative ways, as well as make changes to law and policy, such as reforming aspects of the Endangered Species Act to give landowners an incentive to recover listed species on their land, as PERC has long advocated.

Reduce barriers to active conservation

The wildfire crisis costs Americans nearly $400 billion annually and threatens ecosystems and human communities alike. Forest management, such as thinning and prescribed burning treatments, can greatly reduce wildfire risk. But these treatments are slow, expensive, and easily stopped by local objectors and the threat and reality of lawsuits. Abundance policies could change that. For example, PERC research has found that from the time the U.S. Forest Service begins the environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act, it takes an average of another three-plus years to start a mechanical treatment project on the ground, or nearly five years to start a prescribed burn. More complex forest restoration projects can take much longer. Policy reforms could help accelerate solutions to the wildfire crisis—and there’s similar potential to harness reforms to speed up conservation of endangered species, movement of water through markets, and other domains.

Build conservation fixes into infrastructure abundance

Energy, housing, and other needed human infrastructure can be built in ways that maximize conservation potential—if conservation researchers and practitioners can invent and include these innovations in the construction process. For instance, building out solar on rooftops rather than in native grasslands or forests spares nature, but red tape often makes the former cost prohibitive. Dreaming up ways for solar panels to share land with farms, ranches, canals, and habitat restoration projects can not only use less land but also can juice farm profitability, reduce water loss, and build new habitat for pollinators and other wildlife. On the housing side, wins for people and the environment are possible with clustered development that avoids prime habitat, dense and intensive housing buildouts, and nature-friendly yard practices. We need to create better designs, improved siting tools, supportive policies, and sound incentives to make this happen.

Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, there will be swift currents to navigate and waterfalls to overcome to make a conservation abundance agenda a reality. But in harnessing the principles of abundance, the conservation community, groups focused on human needs and built infrastructure, and conservation-minded citizens across the political spectrum can come together to help build a world where both nature and humans flourish.

[*Note: this is a re-post of the article I published on our organizational website in December. Some smart people told me it was great but they never got to see it or read it, so I’m trying out posting it here for greater reach]

Sophie Gilbert thanks Max Lambert, director of science for the Nature Conservancy in Washington State, for indispensable help thinking through and working on this issue. Their journal article, “Building Plentiful Housing and Energy Needs Conservation Science,” is currently undergoing peer review.