On January 29 I posted this: R.I.P. National Nature Assessment. Now today, from the NY Times: “Trump Killed a Major Report on Nature. They’re Trying to Publish It Anyway.“:
The draft was almost ready for submission, due in less than a month. More than 150 scientists and other experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on the report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States.
But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. So, on Jan. 30, the project’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email telling members of his team that their work had been discontinued.
But it wasn’t the only email he sent that day.
“This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in a separate email to the report’s authors, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we are producing.”
Now key experts who worked on the report, called the National Nature Assessment, are figuring out how to finish and publish it outside the government, according to interviews with nine of the leading authors.
This is the chapter lead that I’m working with:
Rajat Panwar, a professor of responsible and sustainable business at Oregon State University who was leading the chapter on nature and the economy, was preparing slides to present his section when he got the news. He said the team he recruited saw, and still sees, the work as a calling to help solve one of its generation’s most pressing problems, the loss of nature and biodiversity.
“The dependence of the economy on nature,” a theme explored in his group’s 6,000-word chapter, “is understated and understudied and underappreciated,” Dr. Panwar said.
We’ll see where this might go …
More: WA scientists plan to publish report on nature that Trump canceled
