Turning toward the storm in 2025
Earth Hope year-in-review: Condors, wildfire, rivers, bison, sea otters, conservation voters and pocket forests. Plus, bobcats ... because bobcats! Happy New Year!
To ring in the New Year, I want to summarize my most successful stories of 2024, say thank-you to my subscribers, and offer some thoughts on how I want to face 2025. Your support means the world to me. There’s power in numbers, and your presence here is helping to elevate stories of environmental progress. This is a vibrant and engaged community for which I’m deeply grateful. I’ve learned so much from my fellow Substack writers and subscribers. As my subscriber numbers grew, organizations began returning my calls. You’re propelling a positive feedback loop and helping these stories reach more people.🤸♂️
Thank you for being here. 🙏
Hope is my battle cry
Some writers celebrate clicks, likes or subscribers. What’s more gratifying than any of those is when something you wrote changed someone’s heart or mind. After I published this story, several hunters reached out to me to say they’d decided to make the switch to non-lead ammunition and would encourage others to do so. 🙌
How can environmental writers frame stories in ways that engage a broader spectrum of readers, rather than using conflict-based tropes that alienate? Can we write in ways that bring more people into the conversation?
When I sense someone is writing from rage, grief and anxiety, I stop reading. These tactics don’t work on me, and my suspicion is that they don’t work on many others. Writing from a place of hope and focusing on solutions isn’t easy. I’m still training myself to do it.
Yurok Tribe brings the world into balance
My story about the Yurok Tribe earned the highest percentage of likes per reads — by a long shot. The headline celebrated California condors returning to the wild in Yurok Country (Redwood National and State Parks), but this story actually explores the many ways the Yurok are reclaiming their world. I posted it with a note that said: “The Yurok Tribe isn’t giving up; and neither should you.”
A call to action with pocket forests
My pocket forest story earned more likes than any other. I attribute this to the catchy headline and the fact that it related to children, schools and learning. It also contained a call to action after the election left many people feeling helpless: Seize opportunities that lay before our eyes and under our control.
A progress report on the weedy median: On Christmas Day, my husband spotted someone digging in it. I accosted this good man and discovered that he was cheerfully planting California buckeye seeds. Furthermore, he knows the folks at the city who are in charge of mowing. “They spend tens of thousands a year mowing that median. They would love not to do it,” he said. Then I started going on about “Miyawaki forests” and “polinator garden” and “weeding” and he just lit up. So, it appears I’ve recruited a willing co-conspirator to my rewilding dreams!👌🌍🌱
As another aside, an old friend and former copyeditor for the International Herald Tribune, has been helping me proofread Earth Hope. He’d like to remain anonymous. He ruthlessly critiques my headlines. We discussed several dozen headlines before landing on this one. Thanks, dear friend.
Subverting the dominant paradigm after the election
The stone silence in the days after the election reminded me of the catatonic state that follows trauma or loss. I, too, was in a state of shock when a reader nudged me, asking me what her “hope bear” was going to write. I realized that readers might be counting on me. I knew that Californians had voted in favor of $10 billion in climate change bonds, so I dug around for measures that had passed in other states. I thank this reader for her prodding.🐻
My inspiration for Earth Hope: The story of Julia Platt and her sea slug sanctuary
Many people told me this story really inspired them. I’m so glad, because it inspired me, too. Writing about conservation successes can send one into the territory of wildlife porn,1 where people ogle animal stories just to feel good, without understanding the underlying successes. The lesson here is so clear. One hundred years ago, Monterey Bay was an ecological disaster. Now, it’s a global destination and thriving ocean ecosystem.
“Even if no other bay will ever have exactly this story, the fact that a local shore has been driven to the depths of ecological ruin and has recovered—this shows that the pathway of recovery from ruin exists, and is a possibility for places that anyone else calls home.”
— The Death & Life of Monterey Bay (2011, Island Press)
A streamkeeper to watch over them all
When the town of Davis, California, built a diverse community of stakeholders, a river full of trash transformed into a thriving ecosystem that welcomed back salmon. This story has fallen off my leaderboard, but it’s one of my favorites. It was shared widely on other platforms, so it got a lot of reads, but didn’t generate likes here on Substack because those readers didn’t have accounts. Here’s to salmon, bears and eagles!
Turning toward the storm
After I published this piece, a reader sent me to the Threshold podcast about American bison, which discusses not only American Prairie’s work, but also efforts by Native American tribes to rescue from slaughter wild bison who wander out of Yellowstone National Park.
“These animals go into the storm,” said Irvin Carlson, Buffalo Restoration Manager at Blackfeet Tribe in episode 7 of the Threshold podcast. He’s speaking about bison as he looks out onto the herd he manages on the reservation. “Most animals will turn, cows and horses, will turn, hump up and let the snow come to their backs. But, I don’t know what it is, it’s their nature. [Bison] turn into the storm and — face it. … You know what, I have learned a lot from these animals, I have really learned a lot.”
At the time of the podcast, the tribe was trying to get a federal bison reserve under their control, a piece of land that was carved out of their original reservation in Montana over 100 years ago.
In 2023, after many decades of trying, they took full control of the reserve: Bisonrange.org/
Old-growth forests absolutely need thinning
And finally, the story that I was most nervous about publishing, but which earned more new subscribers than any other, was this piece supporting thinning, logging and prescribed burns for wildfire prevention in the American West. Thank you to the reasonable, pragmatic people who expressed their support for these ideas. Hope isn’t always warm and fuzzy. It means driving home solutions.
This topic unfortunately divides environmentalists, all of whom want to protect trees and ecosystems. However, science, law and public policy all increasingly support thinning.
A few national environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, are using decades-old anti-timber rhetoric and fear tactics to raise money and perpetually litigate and lose2 lawsuits opposing thinning projects in forests far from donors, resulting only in dangerous delays in wildfire prevention. These groups are on the wrong side of history.
Corruption and profit are unfortunate facts of life. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are a collection of de facto fiefdoms, where each chief can pursue his or her prerogative without much accountability. The best checks on these realities are engaged tribes, governments and local communities, not environmental groups based in faraway cities promoting quack science.3
Science has shown time and again that thinning plus prescribed fire is the most effective way to decrease wildfire severity. Period. A Tamm review in Forest Ecology and Management, published this summer, concluded unequivocally that “Thinning with prescribed burning was the most effective and persistent treatment.” Beware of people cherry picking data to serve their own beliefs.
No, we shouldn’t cut down old-growth trees.4 They are the strongest and most fire resilient. But to protect old-growth forests, we’ve got to remove the younger trees that spread fire and compete with older trees for water.
The drier the forest, the more this is true. In California, we typically live six months a year without rain. Our forests’ dead wood doesn’t rot. With worsening climate change, increasing drought, and vastly overgrown forests, it’s become too dangerous to introduce fire without thinning first.
As with any issue, time, money and good people are scarce. We need a literal army of well-trained fire personnel to save the West’s forests. Which brings me to the topic of native tribes.
In the above story, I failed to mention one major factor. In addition to fire suppression, litigation, and overregulation, all of which have increased fire danger across the West, colonists removed the original stewards of our forests several hundred years ago and then prosecuted them as arsonists. Native American tribes are now back at the table, effectively advocating for good fire on lands they formerly heavily managed. I look forward to exploring this issue in more depth in 2025.
Earth Hope has no affiliation with any environmental group. I welcome your thoughts and comments below.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! MORE TO COME IN 2025
What is hope to you?
In thinking about hope this year, I’ve arrived at this tentative conclusion: The opposite of hope is not despair. It’s regret. If hope is looking toward the future and seeing the possibility of a better world, regret is the mirror image of that, looking back and feeling terrible about what could have been done to create a different outcome.
Fostering hope doesn’t mean we don’t feel rage, anxiety, disgust, frustration, disappointment or grief. In all honesty, I’m a complete human package, so I come with all those emotions. Just ask me about wildfire …
Perhaps hope isn’t an emotion. Perhaps it’s a verb. What if it means “turn toward the storm”? Face it. Together.
Signing off with bobcats, because … bobcats!
Bunnies have increased in the past ten years in our regional park. So, coyotes and bobcats are also on the rise. Bobcats will typically freeze when they see you and won’t move again until you move. They pose for many long minutes.
Bunnies have also taken over the botanical garden. This year, the garden put up short fences to keep the bunnies from eating their rare plants.
About Earth Hope:
Earth Hope is a solutions-based journalism project that highlights environmental success stories from around the globe, because hope is the foundation of progress. I’m Amanda Royal, a former newspaper reporter and current eco-news junkie. Read more about this project and what inspired it.
Visit earthhope.substack.com for more stories. To view this story in a browser, click on the very top headline.
Readers can help combat this phenomenon by not supporting nature writing that lacks bylines, about pages and photo credits. Great nature photos without credits are typically stolen.
Park service can resume thinning trees in Yosemite for prescribed burns, 9th Circuit rules
Judge dismisses lawsuit against Oregon forest thinning projects
Ninth Circuit rebuffs challenge to Southern California forest thinning project
Forest thinning on Pine Mountain can move forward after Patagonia, Ventura County lawsuit dismissed
Judge dismisses lawsuit aimed at blocking Washington forest project
Judge rejects lawsuit over 'edge effects' from logging on marbled murrelets
The claim that thinning increases fire severity has been debunked several times. The benefits of reducing fuels far outweigh any drying effects of thinning: https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-023-00241-z
"While reducing stand density can lead to greater surface fuel drying (Kane 2021; Whitehead et al. 2006) and higher surface wind speeds (Bigelow & North 2012; Russell et al. 2018), our data provide clear evidence that the suppressing effect of crown fuel reduction far outweighed any enhancing effect of increased drying or higher windspeeds on fire behavior."
Here’s how an old-growth forest might need thinning:
100 years ago, an old-growth tree, say a 500-year-old giant, gains a young neighbor, a sapling. During the evolution of this forest ecosystem over thousands of years, a “normal fire regime,” this young sapling never would have had a chance to grow very big, it would have been killed by fire, started either by man or lightning. Its death preserved nutrients and groundwater for the old tree to continue to thrive.
The old-growth tree, meanwhile, is so huge, its lowest branches are 40 feet off the ground and, traditionally, out of reach of fire. It takes two people to encircle its trunk. Its bark is six inches thick and very fire-proof.
But the young tree was allowed to grow, and it grew to be 100 years old, almost as tall as the old tree, but not nearly as wide, and with branches that reach to the ground, providing a ladder for wildfire to climb into the branches of the old-growth tree.
Not only is the young tree a “ladder fuel,” it’s also very thirsty. It drinks as much water as the old tree. When drought hits and groundwater becomes scarce, both trees become stressed. Stressed and thirsty trees aren’t able to produce the sap they need to protect against bark beetles, a naturally occurring pest in Western forests. Beetle infestations increase.
No, we can’t just walk into this forest and light it on fire in a prescribed burn. Thinning beforehand is absolutely necessary for the safety of controlled burns in dry forests.
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Thank you, Amanda, for the wide range of wonderful offerings and the Hope. All the best in 2025 :)
I saw the kitty :) I had bobcats in my last suburban neighborhood. My crow friends would warn me if mama bobcat was hanging around the yard. She and her youngsters lived in the sewer near my front door. We respected each others space.
Thank you Amanda for releasing the clenched heart I usually feel with the topic of prescribed fires. My brain understands the need for them and their effectiveness. My heart, with ancient and deep-seated associations of death and devastation, wants nothing to do with forest fires. I "dared" to read your article and watch the Nature Conservancy's video you shared, and was left with no conflict... no clenched heart.