Beauty & Bread

All too often, I find myself saying that as an environmentalist, a conservationist, and someone who cares about the planet and the health, not just of ecosystems, but of our own species, we are always losing. It’s a hard truth, but one we must keep fighting against.

Every day, we lose more habitat. More trees are cut down. Water and air are polluted. Worst of all, more and more laws meant to protect us and repair the damage we’ve done are being rescinded. Just today, I saw news that the Environmental Protection Agency has become the antithesis of its own name. The agency will no longer even acknowledge that climate change is real; a fact that goes beyond any reasonable debate.

The only way to deny climate change now is if you simply don’t want it to be real. And even then, the conversation has shifted from denial to apathy. People no longer argue that climate change isn’t happening; they just stop caring. They fall back on absurd analogies like, “The Earth has always gone through ice ages,” or “Climate change is natural.” Maybe that feels like a winning argument if you don’t want to face the fact that the pollutants and carcinogens we keep releasing are not part of some natural cycle, but the result of a species with too much power and too little responsibility.

Honestly, what’s been done to our regulatory agencies should be a crime. Putting the people currently running the Environmental Protection Agency in charge is like putting Ted Bundy in charge of a Girl Scout camp.

But I also look to the wins. Like the removal of the dam on the Elwha River in Olympic National Park and the return of wild salmon runs to that magical place where Native people have fished for generations.

In fact, there’s a surge of dam removals happening across the United States. In 2023, the U.S. removed 80 dams across 23 states, freeing 1,160 miles of river. That year alone, 2,408 dams were removed, reconnecting over 2,528 miles of river. And in August 2024, the Klamath River in southern Oregon and California was finally freed and over 6,000 salmon migrated upstream into newly opened habitat.

Other removals are underway, too. The Kinneytown Dam in Connecticut will be demolished. The Milltown Dam on the St. Croix River came down in 2023. The Scott and Cape Horn Dams will be removed in northern California, restoring the Eel River.

Dam removal works. A 2025 Cornell-led study found that within three years of removing a small dam on an upstate New York stream, upstream and downstream habitats became nearly indistinguishable. Water quality, habitat structure, and macroinvertebrate communities were fully restored.

“The research demonstrates the resilience of nature to recover from imperiled states,” said Jeremy Dietrich, principal aquatic ecologist at the New York State Water Resources Institute in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), and lead author of the study. “We can show that the potential is there to reproduce these results at other sites.”

We’re also finding innovative answers. In Norway, a submerged turbine was invented and installed in the Suldalslågen River. It floats within the current, harnessing the river’s energy while leaving habitat undisturbed.

What we need is more thinking like this. We have to set aside political ideologies that blind us to what’s happening to the planet and focus on solutions that work for everyone.

One more potential win on the horizon: the removal of the O’Shaughnessy Dam, which flooded and destroyed the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. The creation of that dam sparked a monumental fight between the corrupt government of San Francisco and environmentalists like John Muir, who saw through the rhetoric and believed deeply in preservation.

Muir famously said:

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread—places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

That ideal is as true and within reach today as it was over 100 years ago, when Muir was fighting to preserve what remained of the American landscape while the greed of robber barons and industry threatened to consume it all.

We’re facing that fight again now. We need new heroes, like Muir, like Teddy Roosevelt, leaders and politicians who want to create a lasting and beautiful legacy.

The fight over Hetch Hetchy was the last of Muir’s life, and some believe losing it contributed to his death. But Muir’s legacy and vision live on.

And here’s the thing: we can still win. Despite the losses, despite the inevitability of setbacks in conservation, climate, and the fate of our planet... there are wins. And we need to celebrate them and keep working toward more of them.

Doug Schnitzspahn's Opened Container is a weekly column that highlights Doug's unique point of view on the intersection of outdoor culture, policy, business, politics, and conservation. To hear more, listen to Doug's podcast Open Container by clicking here. Let's get some.