The Future is a Forest

Notes on the climate consequences of this time—and how I'm coping.

Feb 06, 2025

Dear friends,

The power grab unfolding in Washington DC over the last few weeks has been hard to watch and even harder to process or integrate.

In addition to the very immediate risk to people’s lives and livelihoods, the second Trump administration is also taking actions that could stall climate mitigation and adaptation around the globe in ways we may not truly understand for years to come. In the first two and a half weeks we have seen the confirmation of Trump loyalist Lee Zeldan as EPA Administrator, the removal of climate information and data from all government websites, the pausing of tens of billions of dollars in energy and environmental spending, and a promise to “claw back” much of that same funding in the months to come. The so-called pause has ground a number of important programs to a halt, including those that would have cleaned up pollution and rebuilt communities after climate disasters, and helped them install solar panels and purchase electric school buses. The EPA moved to lay off 1,000 employees. Elon Musk’s efforts to do away with USAID also stands to impact a number of important programs aimed at reducing deforestation, protecting wildlife, and preserving biodiversity around the world. And it’s not clear yet how much of NOAA’s budget will be left intact after DOGE’s so-called overhaul, but those are tax dollars that go toward monitoring the weather, tracking atmospheric carbon, and protecting coral reefs from ocean acidification, etc.

This onslaught is incredibly difficult to absorb, and it’s part of the new administration’s strategy. Even people who are committed to staying informed can only absorb so many grim updates. What to do, then? How to stay afloat on seas like these? Everyone has (or is now in the process of trying to find) places and practices that help them regroup, reconnect, and regather strength to continue fighting back.

For me, it’s the forest. For the second winter in a row I’ve been spending most of my free time seeking out, harvesting, and learning about mushrooms.

Last weekend a friend took a group of us up to a ridge she’d visited in West Marin and had been plotting to return to ever since. We found ferns, banana slugs, nettles, and the first delicate little lavender irises of the season. As it turned out, the forest floor had been too dry for a few weeks prior to our visit so there were not many mushrooms to speak of. But we walked together up the side of a hill surrounded by trees, and we let the cool foggy air enter our lungs and I didn’t so much mind not having anything to throw in a pan when I got home.

On outings like this I feel an embodied form of sovereignty—not the kind Trump believes he’s entitled to, but the kind we all innately have over ourselves. Our own selves as part of something much larger, our minds and hearts ungovernable.

Mushroom forays also put me most clearly in a state of witnessing, watching, and sitting with what is—and what isn’t. I often make assumptions about the forest only to be humbled and proven wrong. I have avoided part of the woods too near the road only to dip in on the way back and find something great right by the car. Or I’ll leave a mushroom in the woods only to learn later, after reading a guidebook, that I could have brought it home.

In the end, the mushrooms owe me nothing. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a great deal to teach me—about patience but also about refusing to close down to the possibility that things can take a turn for the better just as they can for the worse.

This period of engaging deeply with the unknown is upon us whether we like it or not and if you’ve been socialized to ‘look on the bright side’ it may be time to clear some space in your imagination for what history has shown us can happen when autocrats and authoritarians take power. And to summon the courage to continue witnessing and responding to what unfolds.

For those of us who play out catastrophic scenarios in our minds unprompted: now may also be the time to practice staying present with what we don’t know. What we don’t get to know. As this phase of the story plays out it’s possible that lawmakers, activists, scientists, and other forsaken but dedicated people will come together across a range of ideological divides to stand up for the possibility of a livable planet—and for the people, plants, animals, and fungi who live here. It’s far, far from guaranteed but it is still possible.

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Climate news you might have missed

More unresolved questions about AI’s energy use

There has been a great deal of speculation and debate about DeepSeek, the Chinese Artificial Intelligence model that made waves last week because of all it had achieved with so few resources. If you’ve been following the conversation about the data centers behind AI’s growth and their alarming energy and water use, you may also have found it heartening to hear experts weigh in on what was seen — briefly at least — as a more efficient approach to energy use than OpenAI and the other AI models U.S. tech giants have built. Bill McKibben even called it a smidgen of good news. But it didn’t take long before a number of critics at a range of different media outlets brought up Jevons paradox, the theory that says rather than reducing energy use, increased efficiency will lead us to consume more energy.

“If companies get more for their money, they will find it worthwhile to spend more, and therefore use more energy,” wrote James O’Donnell in the MIT Technology Review.

But whether that expansion will truly cancel out the potential efficiency over the longer term is not entirely clear. Many of these massive data centers have yet to be built, and as Katie Brigham pointed out in Heatmap, “because a lot of the big players are fundamentally constrained by energy availability,” they’ll still have to “work smarter, not harder.” Team Jevons Paradox also assumes that demand for AI will continue to rise, and that’s not guaranteed either, for what it’s worth.

Will England’s rewilding plan prompt people to eat less meat?

UK government officials moved to reduce the amount of land farmed by around 20 percent with the intent to “rewild” some of it and add solar farms on the rest. The policymakers are specifically targeting pasture land and have recommended that residents eat less meat and dairy, and farmers move to “more efficient practices.”

"There's no way that we can satisfy all the requirements that we need from our land without reducing our meat production,” the author of the national strategy told the BBC. That sounds good, but it’s not clear how exactly that will work while the UK continues to import food from elsewhere.

The rationale for cutting down on pastureland appears to be similar to the one opponents of grazing in the Point Reyes National Seashore have taken, and in both cases I wonder about the role supply chain analysis might be playing in the conversation—if it’s there at all.

Farmers in the UK have been gradually moving away from pasture-based production (despite abundant moisture making it a pretty ideal place to graze animals) and toward confinement-based operations or CAFOs. The shift to confinement-based systems has been slower and less all-encompassing there than it has been in the US, but it has picked up speed in recent years. According to Compassion in World Farming, there was a 12 percent increase in the number of factory farms there between 2016 to 2023. Now 85 percent of farmed animals in the UK are raised in CAFOs (compared to at least 95 percent here). So while the intention behind rewilding more of the UK is a good one, it may result in even more “ultra-efficient” but super polluting CAFOs there and more meat imported from places like Brazil, where you might say that the opposite of rewilding is taking place. I wonder what William Jevons would have to say?

The pushback

Should fossil fuels be regulated like nuclear weapons? In Washington state advocates are urging the Washington State Legislature to pass a resolution that calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty was designed to complement the Paris Agreement, but here in the U.S. it may in fact replace it. If successful, Washington would become the 4th US state to call for a Treaty, joining 16 countries doing the same.
I appreciated this interview with Dana R. Fisher, professor at American University and author of Saving Ourselves: from Climate Shocks to Climate Action, in last week’s Climate One podcast. In it she advised climate activists to “create solidarity across identity, orientation and social class”; learn from the Civil Rights and Suffrage movements, which capitalized on the violence committed against them and used it to get more people into the streets; and build community resilience with their neighbors in the face of unforeseen disaster.
A group of young activists from the Sunrise Movement disrupted the Democratic National Committee’s candidate forum last weekend demanding that the committee members “reject the billionaire influence that is shaping the Trump administration” and try harder to connect with working people. Although most attendees appeared to reject their message, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley told Fox News he was surprised he hadn’t seen more like it, “They’re going to be on this planet a lot longer than I am, and if they stop caring passionately about the planet then we have no hope at all,” he added. “So it didn’t bother me.”
None of us want to spend our retirement years in prison, but some older activists are so alarmed by the way the climate crisis is playing out that they’re willing to risk arrest. This story about a 78-year-old British Just Stop Oil protester, who was imprisoned last year and just released to home detention after a delay caused by the inability to find a wrist tag that would fit, is worth reading. And I’d add that it’s especially unsettling to consider given the way some people in DC are flagrantly ignoring the so-called rule of law at the moment.

On the brighter side

Last week, a Scottish court blocked the production of oil and gas in the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea by Shell and the Norwegian company Equinor, pending closer analysis of the project’s impact on the climate.
Scientists in France found 23 different types of mussels—including three classified as near extinct—and 36 species of fish, in the Seine. That’s apparently 10 times more than in the river contained in the 1960s and it’s a good sign that efforts to clean the water in Paris are working. Plus, the mussels themselves will also help clean the water.
Looking to cross the Atlantic without flying? A French startup has just opened up six cabins on its new fleet of wind-powered cargo ships. The trip takes weeks, but the boat boasts that it has decent food and strong wifi, so it’s possible to work onboard. And ships result in 90 percent fewer carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than cargo vessels that use fossil fuels.
A group of California students have captured the adorable Mount Lyell shrew, a tiny mammal that lives in the Eastern Sierra Mountains, on film for the first time.
The Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California is working to reintroduce cultural burns. A recent training near Lake Tahoe helped a new generation of tribal members gain the skills to help expand the practice in the region.
The Asian small-clawed otter—the world’s smallest otter, which is classified as vulnerable to extinction and also adorable—is making a comeback in Nepal.
Starting in the fall, San Francisco State University will now require every student to take a course on climate justice to graduate.
In New York, a high-end mending business is using embroidery and other embellishment to call attention to and celebrate the repairs it makes in an effort to reach customers who want to keep their favorite clothing for longer. Let’s hope this slow fashion trend picks up speed and spreads to other places.