The southern Amargosa River

Listen actively

Participatory democracy in the U.S. gives us unique privileges and duties. We may not be able to comment formally on recent executive orders that defy logic and/or affect science, public health, immigrants and unborn citizens, non-profit organizations, and our environment, including the ongoing climate change emergency, but hypothetically we can comment on how federal agencies implement some of those orders through the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. That is, assuming we’re allowed to comment. As of October 2025, the second Trump administration has ducked some comment periods under a “good cause” exemption, shortened other comment periods, and removed a government website that made commenting easier (1, 2, 3). In combination with the President’s attempts to use the U.S. military against its own citizens (1, 2, 3) and with mass firings at or sometimes outright elimination of inspectors general, government agencies that protect and provide information to the public, and agencies that protect public resources, it’s hard to keep up with policy changes and what we’ve lost. Here are a few websites that might help:

If you miss being able to find climate data and/or need some expert help from climate scientists, try Climate.us, a non-profit website founded by climate scientists fired by the Trump administration this year. The site has already restored the Fifth National Climate Assessment to the public (after the federal government removed access to the report earlier this year). Or visit Climate Central, another non-profit website with easy-to-use tools that help identify how climate change is affecting your own home and places across the world.

Speaking of the climate, if you’d like to track suppression of efforts to fight climate change in the U.S., Columbia University’s Climate Deregulation Tracker might help. For help tracking broader rollbacks of environmental laws, try Harvard University’s Regulatory Tracker. And if you’re trying to keep up with policies that affect public welfare in general, “Just Security” offers a Litigation Tracker that simply tracks legal challenges to actions by the Trump administration, which–although nonprofits and individuals have limited funding to challenge a poorly behaved national government–is a good place to start.

I’d be remiss if I left out Regulations.gov, where the federal government still hypothetically posts new rules for public comment, such as the Rescission of Conservation and Landscape Health Rule (now closed for comment), Rescinding the Definition of Harm Under the Endangered Species Act (closed for comment), and other rescissions in our collective future.

Finally, if you’d like to geek out a little over water and energy policy data, Atlas Public Policy offers several tools to track private and public investments in clean energy and water programs, including the Clean Economy Tracker, the Wetlands Impact Tracker, the Water Program Portal, and the Climate Program Portal.

(As an archival matter, I’ve left suggestions and links to useful sites from February 2025 and earlier below, but conditions are changing rapidly.)

Your vote matters, and so does your voice

Under the second Trump administration, federal agencies that monitor our environment and that enforce laws that protect all the nation’s residents will continue to be weakened—again—or possibly eliminated, just as under the first administration, except that our federal government will be further weakened by a more focused effort to reduce the power of federal agencies (except perhaps those agencies or rules that benefit private profit at public expense). While campaigning, Donald Trump asserted that he wasn’t associated with Project 2025, but he has already appointed proponents of the Project for his administration. Project 2025, among other measures, advocates severely limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to enforce environmental laws, weakening or eliminating the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (yes, the one that among other vital services provides information about hurricanes, tornadoes, and simple daily weather), and reducing or eliminating efforts to combat climate change and its ongoing and devastating effects (see UC Berkeley’s helpful index to pages in which these plans are mentioned here and then use the index or read the suggestions for yourself in Project 2025’s “Presidential Transition Project” here). Laws that affect the air we breathe, the water we drink, our wild neighbors (see an entirely unironic government press release here), our collective health, public land, and our planet’s oceans and atmosphere depend, for the most part, on someone to notice when things go wrong. In the near future, certain elected officials will continue trying to eliminate the role of medical and biological studies, scientific observation and results, and simple logic in policy decisions. They will continue trying to eliminate or limit public access to information and roll back environmental laws while quietly acknowledging dire consequences, reduced enforcement of laws, and reduced or eliminated opportunities for public comment.

Do citizens still matter to public policy? Absolutely. In spite of new exceptions, exclusions, and limitations, the National Environmental Policy Act still requires federal agencies to consider most of the environmental consequences of their actions and to make those considerations available to the public before making a final decision. Most states still require open meetings and allow public comment on projects that require state approval.

(Local and national non-profits and agencies do an excellent job of tracking changes in rules and regional issues, so I’ll try not to complicate matters by posting about acute issues in my region, but when a particularly egregious scientific or environmental rule change pops up for public comment, I will post links here when I have a chance and leave them here as a record. Please feel free to browse the following documents and comment if you feel inspired.)

Early 2025: Help protect federal government agencies that protect you. Many appointees of the second Trump administration are proponents of Project 2025, a plan that advocates reducing the power of the federal government to protect public health, our environment, public education, and safety. The University of California, Berkeley, provides a helpful index to pages of Project 2025 in which plans to dismantle environmental agencies and reduce or eliminate efforts to fight climate change are mentioned. You can use this index to find and read pertinent sections of Project 2025 for yourself in Project 2025’s “Presidential Transition Project” here. If you don’t like what you see, contact your political representatives and ask them to oppose such changes. Tell them how much you value federal government services (e.g., the NOAA’s severe weather tracking services or the EPA’s enforcement of clean water laws) and why these services matter to you and/or to the people you love. Be specific, and be firm. Some politicians have convinced themselves that their constituents will happily breathe and drink pesticides if it protects the pocketbooks of multinational corporations (even though severe illness does neither of those things). They need to hear what you think.

Spring 2022: Read our report and examine the impacts of illegal OHV use near your own home

As any child with a patch of mud, a stick, and unsupervised access to a hose knows, water flows to the point of least resistance. Drawing a line in the sand alters the way water flows; so does carving continuous tracks through delicate desert soil by riding a motorcycle, mountain bike, baby buggy, or ATV—anything with wheels—off roads and trails.

Aside from destroying plants and tearing a continuous hole through the desert’s thin biological skin, a single new motorcycle or mountain bike track funnels water away from the rest of the slope—taking precious water from other plants, which suffer from every drop diverted during the West’s intensifying megadrought, eroding dirt into waterways during rain and flash floods (more likely as plants in areas surrounding the tracks weaken or die), and blowing topsoil into the air when the track is dry. The Southwest doesn’t get much water to begin with; illegal riders divert those few drops and affect the air we breathe, the water we drink, vegetation, pollinators (who need the plants), and other wild animals (who need the water and the plants).The dust generated can affect snowpack and water storage as well as water quality.

Sure, sure, you’re probably saying. Illegal OHV use hurts everybody. Why talk about this now? 

Here’s why: A while back a friend established a website to collect data on illegal OHV use in Inyo County, California,* and last fall several of us used the collected data to write a citizen science report. The report is now available. Please feel free to read it, or if you don’t have time, just skim the one-page summary at the start and scroll through the photos in Appendix IV at the end. 

I’d love to acknowledge and thank all the people who recorded illegal use, collected the reports, analyzed the data, drew maps of damage, and co-wrote the report. But we discussed it and chose to leave our names off the cover. Sometimes the people who run over vegetation, small animals, and biological soil crusts are nice kids or adults who genuinely haven’t put two and two together and come up with asthma, water problems, and dead wildlife yet, but sometimes they’re people who don’t want to know and don’t take the news well when they find out.

*Please note: the site is only for reporting illegal use in Inyo County, California. If you live in a place with an illegal OHV use problem, we heartily recommend doing what we did: 1. Collect dates, locations, and photos that identify where and how often the illegal use happens and how far it goes. (Your volunteers won’t be able to catalog everything; just record what you can and recognize that what you find represents only part of the damage.) 2. Read the research and figure out how it relates to what’s happening in your area (please feel free to use our references section as a starting point). 3.  Write a citizen science report (please feel free to improve what we’ve done). 4. Ask someone (preferably several different someones) to read what you’ve written for clarity and accuracy. 5. Deliver the report to your local and regional land and water managers and political officials. 

Comments due September 4, 2020. “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants: Regulations for Listing Endangered and Threatened Species and Designating Critical Habitat.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service are proposing a new definition of habitat as well as an “alternative” definition of habitat for use in designating “critical habitat” for species. Here’s the problem: Both proposed definitions conflate the general idea of habitat (what an animal can use to survive and reproduce) with the idea of critical habitat (what a threatened or endangered animal must have in order to continue to exist). The “alternative” definition proposes that habitat is “only where the necessary attributes to support the species presently exist.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, even though a fish may be going extinct because it’s losing breeding pools faster than desert springs can mined for groundwater, pools that were habitat and could be habitat if they were restored are no longer considered “habitat.” The goal of the Endangered Species Act (i.e., designating Endangered Species and identifying “critical habitat”) is to “protect and recover imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend,” but the new definition of habitat would make that recovery impossible by definition. Both definitions are also mired in the present—no climate change, restoration projects, diseases, invasive predators, toxic settling ponds, or changing coastlines here, and no consideration or refuges for the long-term future. Neither definition considers the problems of habitat fragmentation and connectivity. The Hill has posted an article about the proposed definitions here and the Center for Biological Diversity has a page about the proposal here. Read the definitions here and comment here.

Comments due April 17, 2020. “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency, is a euphemism for excluding scientific studies from consideration in crafting new environmental regulations. Read about the dangers of the proposed rule here (on the venerable Science magazine’s website) and comment here (at Regulations.gov).