It started with a text in late January: “Call me.”
I was in the Sonoran Desert, fleeing the Pacific Northwest’s winter gloom, and I pulled into a gas station to make the call.
“All work on the National Nature Assessment is to stop,” a Trump White House representative on the other end said. “Immediately.”
For over two years, nearly 200 other scientists and I had been working on the first full accounting of nature in America: an extensive report on its role in our health, economy and well-being. Now, with the revoking of a Biden executive order that called for the assessment, it was seemingly over.
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