Galveston, Texas, January 12, 2025. It was raining. Jeanne and I drove through a subdivision of houses on stilts high enough to park cars under. Water pooled everywhere except for the road that was several inches higher than the yards filled with water. Jim Stevenson’s driveway entrance was hidden among...
Some people wonder whether the climate crisis is real. Hasn’t Earth’s climate always changed? Yes, it has, and there are valid reasons why our climate has gone through periods of warming and cooling for millennia. We are now in a warming period, and this one is caused by an increase...
Imagine paddling a canoe upstream forever. That’s my metaphor for environmental activism. Activists have been paddling against the current with the Clean Water Act on their backs ever since its passage 54 years ago. We have made a lot of progress, but it’s been against the current the whole time—and...
Thirty years ago, Wayne M. Hypes, one of my heroes and a mentor in soil conservation, came into my USDA office in Verona, Virginia, and gave me a wooden candleholder. It was no ordinary candleholder: It was made from American Chestnut, historic wood from a forgotten past. At that time...
I looked up and saw smoke rising from a field far upstream. I stopped in wonder. It can’t be smoke, I thought, because it’s brown. Then I realized it was a giant cloud of windblown soil reaching over a hundred feet into the air. Then I saw the tractor. The...
We have a small farm in Swoope along Trimbles Mill Road. The Middle River flows through it for half a mile. We call it the River Farm. The cows were fenced away from the river in 2004, and we planted trees along the banks. Sycamores Hold the Line I walk...
It was an event of a lifetime—sitting in the courtroom of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) hearing arguments in the U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River case on Monday, February 24—the case that will determine if a dirt path, known as the Appalachian Trail, is actually “land” or not.
Celebrate the victory—the defeat of Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), a 600-mile, high-pressure, fracked-gas pipeline planned to rip through West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. It was a six-year fight for people’s land rights, our water, environmental justice, and common decency.
Note: The text of this post was first published by the Augusta Free Press on May 7, 2026 The Environmental Protection Agency has abdicated its duty to protect Americans and the environment from dirty air. On February 12, 2026, the EPA published its final rule to repeal the Endangerment Finding...
“Well-managed” farmland and other working “open-spaces” should not be taxed when they provide ecosystem services exceeding the cost of public services for the land.
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