In the summer of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt camped with naturalist John Muir in Yosemite Valley. He later called the trip one of the most formative experiences of his life. That encounter helped give rise to the modern conservation movement—not as a preserve for wealthy elites, but as a living inheritance for everyday Americans. Roosevelt did not merely preserve wilderness. He sought its wise use, so that future generations could hunt, fish, farm, explore, and draw strength from the land. “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country,” he declared in 1912. Just as we must conserve our people, he argued, we must conserve the resources upon which they depend.

For much of the past half-century, environmental policy has been shaped by a different vision—one that drifted from stewardship toward abstraction. A vast regulatory system emerged, achieving in places real gains in cleaner air and water and the protection of critical habitats. Yet over time, the focus shifted toward global temperature targets, technocratic mandates, and sweeping economic change. For many Americans, this approach feels detached from daily life—less about the environment around them than about models and metrics set by urban elites. The United Nations’ recent decision to retire its most extreme and implausible climate scenarios—long used to justify sweeping mandates—validates longstanding concerns and creates a clear opening for conservatives to advance a practical, stewardship-based alternative rooted in local knowledge, innovation, and tangible results rather than abstract global targets. What Americans continue to desire is simpler and more enduring: clean water, healthy forests, abundant wildlife, and the freedom to enjoy them.

This divergence presents not only a political opportunity, but a philosophical one. Conservatives do not need to invent a conservation ethic; we inherit one. Theodore Roosevelt showed what it means to treat the natural world not as an obstacle to prosperity, but as one of its foundations. In his time, a limited federal government confronted an immense public domain, and national action was the natural expression of a young republic securing its birthright. Ours is a different moment. The federal government has grown so vast and remote, while stewardship now rests most immediately with states, communities, and private citizens—those closest to the land and most invested in its future.

The task before us is not to replicate Roosevelt’s model, but to recast his vision. He conserved a young nation’s frontier; we must conserve a mature nation’s home. That requires a shift from centralized control to a more grounded approach rooted in local knowledge, private stewardship, and civic responsibility. Conservation remains what it has always been: the wise use of what we have been given. It favors incentives over mandates, responsibility over abstraction, and participation over exclusion.

But conservation is not merely a matter of policy. It is a matter of civic virtue. The natural world is not simply a resource to be managed; it is a source of physical strength, mental clarity, and spiritual renewal. John Muir called it a “temple,” and the biblical call in Genesis to “work it and keep it” reminds us that stewardship is both a privilege and a duty. A people cut off from the land becomes restless and unmoored. A people rooted in it becomes resilient, self-reliant, and patriotic.

What would a modern conservative conservation agenda look like?

First, balance economic growth with environmental stewardship. Across the country, abandoned industrial sites stand as scars of a previous era. These brownfields should be seen not as liabilities, but as opportunities. By expanding support for cleanup and repurposing while empowering states to streamline permitting and offer targeted tax incentives, we can transform neglected and often polluted land into new businesses, parks, trails, and productive community spaces. In doing so, we create jobs, strengthen local tax bases, and relieve pressure to develop untouched landscapes. A nation rebuilding its industrial strength must also restore the land on which that industry once stood.

Second, mobilize voluntary stewardship of our land and waters. The success of the “Adopt-a-Highway” program shows the power of civic participation. That model can extend to rivers, parks, forests, and neighborhoods. By offering modest incentives to civic groups, churches, veterans, and sportsmen, we can foster shared responsibility for the places we inhabit. Expanding master naturalist programs and citizen-led efforts will equip Americans to restore habitats, monitor wildlife, and care for local lands. Community cleanup and beautification should become a common civic practice. Conservation, in this sense, is not just policy—it is habit, pride, and a renewal of citizenship.

Third, align incentives to conserve working lands and natural assets. Private landowners are among the nation’s most important conservationists, and public policy should support that role. Enhanced incentives for conservation easements, zoning reforms that reward preservation of mature trees and natural buffers, and responsible forest management practices can protect habitats while sustaining rural economies. The goal is not to freeze the landscape, but to ensure it remains healthy, productive, and enduring.

Fourth, expand access to the outdoors and renew a culture of engagement. Too often, public lands are protected but difficult to access. By investing in trails, access points, and recreational infrastructure – and reducing unnecessary barriers – we can reconnect Americans with the natural world. Programs that empower states, support wildlife conservation, and encourage citizen involvement should be strengthened. We should also reinvigorate institutions like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, which have long introduced young Americans to outdoor life and stewardship. A renewed national effort to get families outdoors would not only improve public health, but cultivate habits of responsibility and care no regulation can impose.

This approach succeeds not only because it is effective, but because it reflects the American character. It respects property, rewards responsibility, and places trust in citizens rather than distant authorities. More than that, it understands conservation as a form of civic virtue. When a family walks a restored trail, when a landowner preserves a stand of old trees, when a young person helps restore a stream, they are not merely improving the landscape—they are strengthening their connection to the country itself.

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Theodore Roosevelt understood this deeply. “The nation behaves well,” he said, “if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.” That principle remains as urgent today as it was a century ago. We are not the owners of this inheritance, but its stewards.

A conservative conservation agenda, rooted in that understanding, can deliver healthier lands, stronger communities, and a renewed sense of national pride. It can restore not only our lands, but our sense of obligation to our nation and to those who will follow us. That is not merely good policy. It is a duty—to hand down a country not diminished, but renewed.

Nate Uldricks is a master naturalist and Cub Scout leader, and previously served in senior roles at the White House and Pentagon. He is an also ACC member.

1. Plant Vogtle is now the largest generator of clean energy in the U.S. What does that tell us about the role of nuclear in America’s energy future?

Plant Vogtle becoming the largest clean energy generator in the country tells us something important: nuclear energy isn’t just part of America’s energy future, it’s foundational to it.

As we see electricity demands grow and expectations for reliability increase, you need sources that can operate around the clock and at scale. Nuclear delivers that. It provides long-term power – these are 80-year assets – with proven performance and supports energy security in a way no other clean resource can on its own.

Vogtle also demonstrates what’s possible when you invest for the long term: Assets like these not only support communities, but they strengthen the grid and deliver clean energy Americans can count on every day.

Finally, Vogtle reinforces that nuclear can be deployed at meaningful scale in the U.S. when projects are approached with discipline and a long‑term view.

2. How important is nuclear energy’s reliability as electricity demand grows in Georgia? In the United States?

Reliability is essential to why nuclear energy matters, especially as electricity demand continues to grow in Georgia and across the country. When people think about electricity supply, they are really focused on two things: first, does the light come on when they flip the switch, and second, how much does it cost? Nuclear helps answer both questions because our units run around the clock and provide a stable source of power when customers need it most.

Just as important, nuclear also brings a long-term cost advantage because its fuel costs are relatively low and predictable compared with many other sources of generation. That means nuclear supports affordability not just by producing large amounts of electricity reliably, but by helping shield customers from fuel price volatility over time.

We’re seeing transformational growth in Georgia, necessitating 10 GW of company-owned new resources under construction and in service by the end of this decade, driven by economic development, data centers, and electrification. Meeting that demand requires energy sources that are available around the clock, in all conditions. Nuclear provides that reliability every day.

At the national level, the same principle applies. As we modernize the grid and add more variable resources, nuclear’s ability to operate continuously at scale becomes even more important. It provides a stable foundation for reliability, energy security, and long-term affordability.

3. On the local level, how have residents embraced having nuclear in their own backyard? Is nuclear energy a good neighbor?

What we consistently see in our footprint, is that when communities actually live next to nuclear plants, they tend to be some of nuclear energy’s strongest supporters. At Georgia Power, we have this saying that “we’re a citizen wherever we serve”, and we see that in our communities.

That starts with trust. We recognize that our communities have entrusted us with the responsibility of safe and reliable operation, and we take that responsibility seriously and with great pride. These plants aren’t abstract infrastructure, they’re operated by people who live nearby, send their kids to local schools and participate in the community every day. Over time, residents see firsthand what nuclear looks like in practice: safe operations, a long-term commitment to excellence and a strong sense of responsibility to the community.

Nuclear plants also tend to be very good neighbors in tangible ways. They provide stable, high-quality jobs; they contribute significantly to local tax bases; and employees oftentimes are very involved in their community in many ways. That kind of long-term and active presence creates relationships that matter.

Just as important, people value reliability. When storms hit or demand peaks, nuclear plants continue operating, providing steady electricity people can count on. That reliability earns confidence, especially in regions that understand how essential dependable power is to everyday life.

4. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were the first new nuclear builds in the U.S. in over 30 years. What does it say about America’s ability (or inability) to build energy infrastructure today?

Vogtle sends a clear message: the United States can still build large, complex energy infrastructure, but success depends on the right policy in place to allow companies to build and those companies need discipline, execution, and a willingness to apply lessons learned.

After more than 30 years without new nuclear construction, the country had lost much of the workforce, supply chain and institutional muscle required for projects of this scale. Vogtle wasn’t just about building two reactors; it was about rebuilding an entire ecosystem — restoring engineering capability, qualifying suppliers, and training a new generation of nuclear workers who now know how to build plants, from craft labor to engineers and technicians. It also helped rebuild the regulatory experience that is necessary for projects like this. Our regulator had not overseen new nuclear construction in a long time, so all of those capabilities had to come together at once.

What’s encouraging is that once you rebuild those capabilities, they’re reusable. Unit 4 was built 20% cheaper and commissioned in half the time than Unit 3 because we applied lessons learned. We now understand the value of mature designs, disciplined project management, and early alignment across engineering, construction, operations, and regulatory processes. Those lessons significantly reduce risk going forward and reinforce a very important point: these projects get better with repetition and standardization.

At Southern Nuclear, we see it as our responsibility to share those lessons broadly, because the success of the next projects matters not just to individual companies, but to the future of nuclear energy in this country.

So I’d say Vogtle reflects both a challenge and an opportunity. It highlights the consequences of long periods of underinvestment in infrastructure, but it also demonstrates that with consistency, repetition and the right policy environment, the United States can deliver large-scale, reliable energy projects again.

The key now is not to treat Vogtle as a one-off. If we continue to build using proven designs and applying what we’ve learned, we strengthen our ability to deliver the infrastructure required to meet growing demand, maintain reliability and support long-term energy security.

5. If the U.S. wants more projects like Vogtle, what needs to change to make large-scale energy builds faster and more cost-effective?

If the U.S. wants more projects like Vogtle, the most important shift is toward durable policy that supports repetition.

Vogtle showed us that America can still build large-scale energy infrastructure, but it also showed us the cost of doing it after a long pause. When you go decades without building, you experience those first-of-a-kind project challenges and lose skilled workforces, domestic supply chains and construction experience. Rebuilding all of that at once is inherently harder and more expensive and we don’t want to go rebuild that again in 10 or 20 years.

The biggest lesson is that these projects get faster and more affordable when they stop being one-offs. Complete and mature designs matter. Standardization matters. A ‘design once, build many’ approach allows learning to compound over time, which directly reduces cost and schedule risk. Vogtle Unit 4 benefited from the lessons of Unit 3, and that improvement was the result of repetition and discipline, not chance.

There’s also a need for durable policy, regulation and financing. Not less rigor, but predictable expectations and risk-sharing structures that recognize first-of-a-kind realities while protecting customers. The takeaway from Vogtle isn’t that building large infrastructure is too hard; it’s that doing it sporadically is costly. Doing it consistently is how you build capability, affordability and long-term success. We’ve seen this in other countries that have adopted standardized nuclear development programs: they design once, build many, work through the first-of-a-kind challenges, and then repeatedly deploy reactors on schedule and on budget.

6. Vogtle went through a complex federal and state approval process. How did permitting timelines affect the project, and what reforms could help accelerate future clean energy projects?

Yes, Vogtle went through a long, complex, and very rigorous federal and state approval process and that rigor matters.

For nuclear energy, strong, independent oversight is essential. The depth of review builds public trust, reinforces a strong safety culture, and ensures plants like Vogtle can operate safely for generations to come. That scrutiny ultimately strengthens projects, and it helped establish a licensing framework that future builds can rely on with more confidence.

At the same time, the length and sequencing of the process had real consequences. When I look back at the federal licensing timeline for Vogtle between the applications for the early site permit, the limited work authorization and ultimately our combined construction operating license, we were in licensing for roughly five years. Reviews often occurred one after another instead of in parallel. Requirements evolved. Agencies worked on different timelines. That uncertainty makes large projects harder to plan and more expensive to deliver.

Policies in the ADVANCE Act and the executive orders from the administration aimed at modernizing permitting are an encouraging step in the right direction. Those are really starting to shorten timelines, and we believe that there’s a real opportunity to get plants licensed quicker with the same amount of rigor, especially if you use a standard design like an AP1000.

Westinghouse has submitted Revision 20 of the AP1000 design certification, which takes the design we used at Vogtle and updates it with what we learned during construction and early operations. In effect, Vogtle Unit 4 is now the standard AP1000 for future deployment anywhere in the world.

That matters because a proven, standardized design can significantly shorten the licensing timeline and help future projects move faster. Just as important, none of that reduces rigor. Strong NRC oversight remains essential to safety, public trust, and long-term performance.

The real opportunity now is to build on what we’ve already done. We know how this plant works, and we know how to build it. If we pair that experience with a more predictable regulatory pathway, we can move the next generation of nuclear projects forward much more efficiently.

7. There’s a growing national conversation about permitting reform: how critical is it to ensuring the U.S. can actually deploy clean energy at the scale we want to see?

Permitting reform is absolutely critical if the U.S. is serious about deploying clean energy at the scale we’re talking about.

Across all major energy infrastructure like nuclear, natural gas, transmission, renewables, etc., long and uncertain permitting timelines introduce risk that can delay projects or prevent them from moving forward at all.

For capital-intensive projects like nuclear, predictability matters even more. These projects require large upfront investments and long planning horizons, and developers and investors need confidence in both the scope and timing of regulatory reviews.

The goal of permitting reform shouldn’t be to weaken environmental or safety standards – those are foundational. The real opportunity is to improve coordination, transparency and schedule certainty across agencies, so projects can move forward with confidence once requirements are defined.

If we want to achieve total energy dominance at meaningful scale in this country, permitting systems have to be tough, independent and credible while also being predictable enough to support efficient execution.

8. As a whole, Vogtle can power roughly a million home and businesses. How important are projects like this for energy security and economic growth in the Southeast?

Large projects like this are critically important because they provide the scale and reliability that both energy security and economic growth depend on.

From an energy-security standpoint, having substantial, domestic generation that runs around the clock strengthens the resilience of the grid. These facilities aren’t dependent on weather conditions or real-time fuel delivery, and their fuel can be secured years in advance. Roughly eight trucks provide 18 months of fuel for each Vogtle unit. That kind of predictability matters as electricity demand grows.

Economically, dependable electricity is a prerequisite for growth. Communities and businesses invest when they know power will be reliable and affordable over the long term. We saw this firsthand with Vogtle, as several businesses moved to Georgia and invested in Georgia because they saw the state investing in large energy projects like Vogtle 3 & 4.

So, you see that large, long-lived energy projects create sustained value beyond electricity itself. These projects support skilled jobs, stable tax bases, and regional supply chains for decades. In that sense, projects like this serve as economic anchors that help regions grow with confidence.

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9. From a national perspective, how does investing in large, clean energy sources like nuclear strengthen American energy dominance on a global scale?

From a national perspective, investing in large, clean energy sources like nuclear strengthens American energy dominance in several fundamental ways.

First, it reinforces energy security. Large-scale nuclear generation provides reliable, domestic power that operates around the clock, independent of weather or real-time fuel delivery. Fuel can be secured years in advance, which adds resilience to the system at a time when electricity demand is growing and energy reliability increasingly intersects with national security.

Second, it supports long-term economic strength. Reliable power is the foundation for manufacturing, advanced technology, data centers and other energy-intensive industries that drive innovation and growth. Nuclear units are designed to operate between 60-80 years. When the U.S. invests in large-scale infrastructure designed to operate for decades, it signals stability and confidence both to domestic businesses and to global markets.

And finally, it’s about competitiveness. Countries that can build and operate reliable energy at scale aren’t just meeting their own needs, they’re shaping global standards, strengthening supply chains, and maintaining leadership in technology and industry. Investing in large-scale nuclear helps ensure the United States stays competitive in a world where energy reliability and economic strength are increasingly inseparable.

By late May, the children have returned to the good, wild green places in earnest. The long confinement of winter has fallen away from them piece by piece until suddenly they are no longer lingering near the window or asking permission to wander but instead disappearing outright into the field and the forest with a slam of the screen door and baskets in hand. They return scratched by brambles, freckled with sunburn across their noses and shoulders, dotted red with bug bites around their ankles and eyes. Their hands smell of crushed ferns and wet loam and brook water. A mother may wince a little at the scratches while rubbing salve on sun-warmed shoulders before bed, but deep down we recognize these small discomforts for what they really are: signs of a childhood properly underway.

The fiddleheads have risen thick along the brooks now beneath the frothing canopy, and the ramps have spread their broad green leaves through the damp places where the snow lingered longest. The morels whisper where water flowed a month ago. Families step carefully through the woods with children hurrying ahead along the path, baskets swinging at their sides while they search the forest floor with the seriousness children reserve for treasure hunts, and salamanders, and bird nests. We kneel in the dirt beside them and teach them how to harvest lightly, how to leave enough behind for next spring and all the springs to follow, how to recognize the places where the fiddleheads grow strongest and where the ramps should simply be left alone.

It begins when a child learns that the woods are not merely scenery, not merely a setting for their stories, but a living place that feeds us, shelters us, scratches us, stains our fingers green, and silently requests care in return.

The season itself seems determined to push children outward with no regard for consequence. They run barefoot through the dandelions with abandon, heedless of the bees foraging lazily among them. They ride bicycles down dusty roads until twilight and return smelling of sweat and warm earth. June bugs throw themselves against the screen doors at night while peepers sing out from the low wet places, and the children beg to stay outside just a little longer in that dusky lavender fade-light. These are all but mere heralds, however, to the crescendo of May; Memorial Day approaches and with it comes the unofficial beginning of everything good and green and vital in American life: fishing poles leaning against garages, grills dragged out into backyards, canoes untied from rafters, gardens planted in hopeful rows. The red, white, and blue bunting flaps amid a backdrop of green while the whole country seems to exhale and step outdoors again, ever led by the wise children who knew it was time before the calendar granted us adults the permission we too often seek. We now endure the thorns and bug bites and sunburns gladly because they arrive alongside all the freedoms winter withheld from us.

Modern life increasingly encourages the opposite sort of childhood than this green feast accompanying the brambles, the burns, and the bites. A sterile childhood. An indoor childhood. A childhood scrubbed clean of dirt and weather and risk and wandering. We are told to keep the children comfortable, shaded, entertained, supervised, sanitized. Yet anyone who has watched a child burst out the door on a warm May morning knows instinctively that this cannot possibly be the whole truth of a good life. Children yearn for the forest and the field. They want the brook and the mud and the bugs and the low branches that tear at their sleeves. They want pockets full of strange rocks and hands stained by berries and knees grass-green from skidding around the yard. They want to disappear into the woods for an hour and return carrying treasures they barely understand themselves and we adults have forgotten the meaning of. Their love for the natural world emerges from participation. From bug bites, from brambles, from long evenings outside while the light lingers over the far hill.

Perhaps that is why late spring feels so restorative to us adults as well. The children draw us back into patterns we have neglected, forgotten, lost. We slow down enough to notice the wild strawberries flowering at the field’s edge or the scent of damp pine rising from the forest floor after rain. We begin measuring the day by birdsong and sunlight again rather than crises and headlines. The children remind us that the world is still tangible, still seasonal, still alive beneath all the noise of modernity. Their scratches and sunburns become proof of something larger, evidence that they are forming the sort of attachments from which all good stewardship eventually grows.

Yes, a child slightly bruised, bloodied, and battered by May is often a child fully alive.

A child growing in fidelity to place.

The bites fade, the scratches heal, the sunburn peels away by June. What remains is familiarity with the land, affection for their little particular plot, confidence moving through the verdant understory of the natural world. These are the beginnings of a marrow-deep commitment to the good green things that raised us, that which we grew alongside. Conservation grows from that fertile soil more reliably than anywhere else. It does not grow first in committee hearings or classrooms or campaigns, but in the long grass beyond the porch where children wander out into the season and return home carrying the red litany of the whole living world written on their fair skin.

Ryan Anderson is the Stakeholder Communications Manager at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC) and the author of Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. Follow him on X @OldHollowTree.

By Chris Barnard, President of the American Conservation Coalition.

In an era of rapidly advancing technology, the line between man and machine seems to be blurring faster than ever before. AI assistants, online friends, and virtual colleagues are quickly becoming part of not only our digital but also our cultural and social environments. With much of our interpersonal communication already happening through digital media, the contours delineating what it actually means to be human, rather than a convincing replica of one, may soon be impossible to discern. In the end, it may be matter that matters.

Speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship a few months ago, Mary Harrington and Jonathan Pageau began to outline the defining features of human identity in this digital age. Harrington identified humanity’s need to ground ourselves in specific virtues to guide our lives, while Pageau emphasized humanity’s uniqueness via the Imago Dei. Both made fascinating and true observations about the metaphysical and intellectual realities that separate humans from artificial intelligence. I would add an additional dimension to that conversation: Humans aren’t defined solely by abstract virtues or creative consciousness; we are also who we are because of our physical nature. Our very being involves a physicality so important that all of Christian metaphysics hinges on physics – the incarnation and bodily sacrifice of Jesus here on earth.

Our physicality, our rootedness in specific places, bodies, and landscapes, is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. In our new digital world, our connection to the tangible world becomes not just nostalgic, but necessary. Protecting and conserving the natural world around us, then, is about more than merely conserving beauty – it is fundamentally about preserving ourselves. Staying human today requires staying grounded in this physical world, cultivating a proper relationship with the outdoors as something to steward, cherish, and live within, rather than escape from or exploit.

If there’s a quote that directly sums up many people’s disconnectedness with their bodies, it may be this one, found variously attributed in memes online: “You’re a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust, riding a rock, hurtling through space. Fear nothing.” Though it echoes God’s curse on Adam during the fall, For dust you are, and to dust you shall return, the sleight of hand lies in that the new phrase sees us as disembodied beings. We are no longer dust, but ghosts. No longer bodies, just driving them.

This disembodiment is the philosophical fruit of postmodernism and has embedded itself so deeply into modern thought that it often goes unnoticed and unprotested. Whereas classical thought viewed the body and soul as an integrated whole, both equally part of who someone is, postmodernists argued that identity categories like race and gender were socially constructed, and sought to free what they saw as the “self” from the bodies that bore the scars and restrictions of social and political power structures. This alienation eventually led to the language we hear today, including terms like “queer bodies” or “black and brown bodies”, and eventually to things like trans ideology, that require the divorce of body and soul in order to remain coherent.

While postmodernist thought sees this disembodiment as a necessary liberation from the physical constraints of our bodies, their limitations, their sexual, racial, and class implications, and their political and economic oppression, the physical constraints of the created world should be seen as freeing, not claustrophobic. Man’s creative spirit can and should thrive, in particular in his cultivation and stewardship of the created world, but must be properly rooted within the constraints and confines of the natural world. In the same way that objective metaphysical truth guides and shapes us as moral beings, objective physical truth offers guardrails and boundaries that help us make sense of the world around us. This anchoring ultimately frees man’s creative spirit, not in the transhumanist sense but in the properly-ordered sense of living and innovating within a finite world.

If humanity now sees itself as having conquered the physical world, historically that dynamic was inverted. Once upon a time, our ties to our physicality and the earth were unignorable, tethered as we were to the land by virtue of our ancestry, seasons by virtue of our food, and the elements by virtue of our tools. Today, modern technology has rendered this relationship more optional than ever. Indeed, it must even be an active choice for many, as life in the digitized world becomes more and more unmoored from our bodies, world, and their limits.

Conservation, then, is not just a matter of conserving the physical world but of our relationship to it. Protecting nature is often seen as something we either do as atonement for our carbon footprints or as an abstract act of altruism, but this mental model of environmentalism unhelpfully neglects humanity’s part in the picture. Conservation, rather, must exist in the context of human-ordered ends in order to be coherent. In addition to altruism, we conserve forests to balance our needs for resources and recreation, water for drinking and navigation, and balance pollution between public health and economic opportunity. If the goal were purely preservation, environmentalism would simply be a matter of minimizing our footprints at all cost rather than exercising prudence over where to step.

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While much of this relationship is removed from our periphery courtesy of our supply chains, time outdoors can bring us back face-to-face with our ties to the physical world. Nature reminds us of our scale and our limits in extremely tangible ways, restricting our power with a tether to the material world. It also binds us to itself, reinforcing a sense of belonging to something greater than just our individuality. Finding our place in the outdoors is the antivenom to climate catastrophism precisely because it anchors humanity within the natural world rather than seeing us as its natural predator. Whereas climate extremism acts as a religion without salvation, plagued by panic, a more rooted view of conservation offers an opportunity for gratitude and an invitation to steward the balance between enjoyment, necessity, and protection for future generations.

In the digital age, these efforts become doubly more central to preserving not just the landscapes, but also the conditions and practices that remind us of who we are as embodied beings. Time spent tending a garden, walking a ridgeline, or fishing a stream reconnects us with the natural textures and rhythms of the earth that distinguishes us from artificial mockups of life. Conservation is no luddite rejection of innovation, but a re-centering, an insistence that even as virtual spaces expand, our roots in real places, seasons, and ecosystems remain essential. In protecting the natural world, we are not merely safeguarding scenery; we are safeguarding the tapestry against which human life, in its fullest and most meaningful sense, once unfolded, currently unfolds, and will continue to unfold.

In recent history, this safeguarding has become several layers too abstract, to the detriment of the environmental movement. In an effort to stress the urgency of issues like climate change, many environmentalists have invoked polar bears, penguins, and glaciers, inadvertently detaching the project of conservation farther from home. True conservation begins not with abstract love for Mother Nature but with affection for the particular places – and its people – we know intimately. Wendell Berry’s call to “know the land and be known by it” underscores that stewardship flourishes where rootedness exists. It is far easier to care for a creek you’ve fished with your grandfather, or a field you’ve worked beside neighbors, than for the distance and abstraction, however heart-wrenching, of an endangered species you have only ever seen in a David Attenborough documentary. Building personal and communal ties to specific landscapes fosters not just belonging but responsibility, borne from the realization that our welfare and that of our corner of the earth are inextricably linked. In an era when mobility, virtual connection, and placelessness are default, cultivating loyalty to locality is a step of quiet radicalism.

Of course, this vision of conservation should manifest in practical implications, too. It calls us to protect landscapes not just for posterity, but because they root us in a shared story of heritage. It calls for supporting generational farms that tie communities to land through work, memory, and care. It looks like building walkable city centers and public parks that knit together daily life with daily reminders of nature through green space. It includes securing access to hunting lands, rivers, and trails that sustain outdoor traditions and deepen civic connection to the natural world. And it means ensuring every child has the chance to encounter the outdoors through school field trips, summer camps, or scouting programs, not just for recreation, but as a formative part of becoming human. These efforts, both personal and public, restore a grounded environmentalism, one rooted not in fear or abstraction, but in love of place, people, and their tangible permanence.

As artificial intelligence accelerates the drift toward disembodiment, and all of the implications for our mental health intensify, conservation emerges not simply as an environmental ethic but as a human one. It is a way of anchoring ourselves in reality, a deliberate return to the tangible patterns that remind us who we are. In an age where machines can mimic voices, faces, and even emotions, what cannot be replicated is the sacramental integrity of life designed for communion with the created order. The task before us is not to reject technology, but to wield it without losing our footing, ensuring that in a world of growing virtuality, we remain people of place. Conservation in the age of AI is not just about saving the planet, but about saving the conditions in which human life can remain fully human. It is an invitation to stay grounded not out of empty nostalgia, but rather out of existential necessity.

Chris Barnard is the President of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). Follow him on X @ChrisBarnardDL.

A decade ago, an autoimmune condition I had been struggling with finally relented when I adopted a carnivore‑ketogenic diet. The approach was well outside the mainstream of either the public‑health or environmental conversation at the time, and a growing body of peer‑reviewed work is only now beginning to take the underlying mechanisms seriously.

That experience reshaped my life and career. Over the following years, I worked across nearly every major “stakeholder group” in the sustainable food system — inside a Danone portfolio that included major dairy and water brands; at food‑waste nonprofits like ReFED; and in government and impact‑investment roles. What kept catching my attention was how reflexively each of these institutions oriented around plant‑based alternatives, often at the expense of livestock systems that, when properly managed, are essential to ecological resilience and human health alike. So I went looking for the science that did not shy away from animal agriculture.

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That search led me to rural Ohio, where I am now a graduate student at The Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. My work is sociological rather than agronomic: I am trying to understand what actually shapes the way farmers, and beef cattle producers in particular, decide whether or not to raise cattle using regenerative principles. Our team recently ran a six‑wave statewide mailed survey to Ohio & Missouri farmers, and I am now spending the spring driving around the Midwest speaking to beef cattle graziers directly. I have been to 40 operations so far, with hopes of reaching 8 more before the month is out.

What I have found, and what I think most readers will not expect, is that ‘regenerative agriculture’ is best understood not as a farming technique but as a private landowner’s decision‑making process. Whether someone takes up cover cropping, no‑till, rotational grazing, integrated crop‑livestock systems, or a general avoidance of inputs that kill what wants to live, those choices flow from how a particular landowner weighs a particular set of farm and household constraints. Agricultural decision-making science and sociology captures most of them: structure, infrastructure, access to capital and equipment, the scale of the operation, the economic and geographic contexts, and on top of all of that, the socio-cultural dynamics that influence who the landowner is as a person and what they hope their land will become.

The popular narrative casts farmers as the holdouts. That is not what the agricultural research, surveys, or my personal interactions with farmers suggest the full picture is all about. Our team has found that producers are largely persuaded of the benefits; they more or less understand the soil‑health gains, the ecological case, and the long‑run logic.

Wells, fencing, springs, and water lines are all components in the unglamorous capital stack that make rotational grazing or an integrated livestock system viable in the first place. A farmer who cannot run reliable water to a field cannot rotate cattle through it, no matter how much he or she values the practice.

Many of the systems we have built reinforce this gap. Conventional production sits atop decades of accreted infrastructure, capital channels, and policy support, and alternative practices begin at a real material disadvantage. But those systems are still responsive to feedback, and one lever they can respond to is demand. This is where consumers come in, and it is where I want to be careful, because the conversation about how to “support farmers” has gotten a little decorative.

Farmer’s markets are wonderful, and I do not want to be ungenerous about them, but it helps to be honest about what they are. They are a taste test. They are a community‑development tool, an introduction, a handshake. They are not, in themselves, the demand signal that will shift a producer’s risk math. The signal that can is a household that knows a farmer by name and buys from them in volume — a quarter, a half, or a side of ground beef into a deep freezer at home. The American Grassfed Association maintains a producer directory (I have no affiliation) that is a reasonable starting point for finding nearby ranchers raising cattle in ways likely to conserve or rebuild topsoil. The deep freezer is the unlock. Once it is in your home, the per‑pound cost drops considerably, the relationship deepens, and the producer gets the kind of cash flow that justifies selling direct in the first place. Many producers will have a waitlist. That is a good sign.

It also helps to remember who you are talking to. Survey results show only about seven percent of Ohioan farms are supported entirely by farm income; the rest of those households piece things together with off‑farm jobs or a hybrid of the two. We say we want farmers to care more about practices that regenerate soil and ecology, but a farmer whose attention is split across two or three income streams cannot give the land the focus it deserves. Every direct relationship between a household and a producer is a small step toward letting that producer be more attentive to their land (to a degree, direct marketing efforts can be an unwanted distraction from production). On this point, I will allow myself one firm view: real ‘regenerative’ practices have to include livestock. You can conserve soil and slow soil loss without animals, but it is very difficult to truly restore it. The increases in carbon and water retention, in available nutrients, in biological diversity come back through properly managed animals on the land.

The farming puzzle is about more than telling farmers it is important. We have come a long way, and the buy‑in on their end is largely there. I may be biased, but what I think will carry us across to a tipping point is something quieter and more local: communities that know their growers, and the small, durable connections between a consumer and a farmer that turn good principles into a working local economy.

Alex Rehbinder is a Research and Teaching Assistant at The Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. He is also a member of the ACC Columbus branch.

The MAHA movement has drawn attention to a dire, decades-old crisis hanging over Americans’ unsuspecting heads: the disappearance of small, family farms. Once the backbone of the nation’s food supply, most small farms have been steadily consolidated, or run out of business by corporate monopolies partnered with federal government agencies (aka “regulatory capture”). Food quality has diminished as consumers have become addicted (literally) to unhealthy processed food substitutes. Is the support of small farms just wistful naivete, or a path for the future?

I’ve been farming for the last 25 years. My family has farmed here on this Vermont mountaintop for over two centuries – my great-great-great-great-grandfather is buried a short walk from where my grass-fed cows dine daily. In 1929, there were about 27,000 Vermont dairy farms: now there are fewer than 600.

Yes, times change, but not always for the better. As society (especially today’s younger generations) become more aware of the central importance of gut and soil microbes for human health, the industrial agricultural system praised as the “Green Revolution” is coming under overdue scrutiny. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the movement he has championed have awakened a grassroots reckoning that will endure beyond the current Trump administration.

My personal mentor and teacher over the past two decades has been Kentucky writer Wendell Berry, who has warned Americans since the 1950s about the long-term environmental costs of industrial farming practices. What he has taught for six decades is increasingly evident in each new scientific study of the gut and soil microbiomes.

As Wendell has written:

Turns out, we humans are intimately connected with beneficial bacteria and other microbes in that stuff we call “dirt.” The chemicals we spray on the land to feed crops and kill weeds sickens that essential microbial life-source. There are some 50 billion microbes in a teaspoon of healthy soil; an estimated eight tons of living organisms populate the top 4 inches of every acre of robust soil. Indigenous tribes exhibit flourishing gut microbiomes teeming with diversity; urban American residents exhibit some of the sickliest of gut microbiomes, caused by “dietary urbanization.” The consequences of chronic disease surround us, and the #1 cause is cheap factory food devoid of essential nutrients, but full of laboratory-concocted artificial flavorings and colorings, and even chemicals designed to block our natural satiety signals to the brain (the “brain-gut connection”).

No wonder we are so sickly. Children and women are especially vulnerable to these toxins and deficiencies. Yet, for about a century, our industrial response to this industrial trauma to soil, animals, and humans has been to fashion industrial remedies called “medicines.” Business interests profit by tricking humans to keep eating when they are full; they profit again when they sell drugs to “fix” the illness that is thereby caused. High blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and other widespread illnesses are devastating our healthcare system and economy, as well as human happiness. The pharmaceutical industry makes a LOT of money from disease: Wegovy and Ozempic work by turning that satiety trigger back on and signaling to the body to stop eating; insulin counters the diabetes caused by high sugar intake.

Again, Wendell Berry summed it up adroitly decades ago:

Most people have no idea where their food comes from or what may be lurking within it. Modern society has severed the historic economic and cultural ties between “consumers” (itself a reductionist, industrialized term) and farmers. Multinational corporations, enabled by university research, favorable tax and regulatory structures, and various subsidies, have inserted themselves into that chasm. Now they want to create faux meats in factories: the patented corporate control of all food resources is imminent. AI will be the final electronic-currency, social-credit-monitored connection.

MAHA has challenged that dystopian vision by reminding both the health and food industries that they are ultimately dependent on We the People (aka “consumers” and taxpayers), not on regulatory agencies, or on the food propaganda employed to beguile us. Trix are not for kids. Frosted Flakes are not “Gr-e-a-a-a-t!”

Plant-based meat substitutes are highly processed from chemically-laden GMO monoculture crops. The invisible organisms in the soil and our guts are waging war against the invisible chemicals insinuated into our soup (and everything else!).

The perceived battle between conventional (industrial) farming and local family farms is itself a distraction. This binary keeps both sides vilifying one another. In truth, most of the healthy table foods Americans eat are grown by mid-sized farms. Furthermore, large farms can employ regenerative farming practices, and small farms can pollute with pesticides. And Wal-Mart and JBS Foods are “family-owned,” so even that label can prove obfuscatory.

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The core issue is the life-giving connection between the microbes in soil and plants and animals (whether human or livestock). Global NGOs and the world’s largest food and Pharma companies meet to scheme a unified food supply system, which they will utterly dominate at the expense of soil and human health. America imports more processed foods (many from China) every year. A healthier future for Americans begins with healthy food as a preventive, and this requires nurtured farms and healthy soil.

America needs a new generation to take the reins from its aging farmers. Gen Z and Millennials are already leading the way in their food choices. They want foods untainted by glyphosate and other pesticides. They want meat from well-treated animals, free of hormones and antibiotics. They understand the connection between healthy food, environmentalism, and properly stewarded soils.

Small and mid-sized farms using regenerative practices can meet this need and, in the process, revitalize struggling rural communities and provide income for young entrepreneurs displaced by AI. Local production reduces the distances foods are shipped, cutting vehicle emissions while strengthening supply chains and food security.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather raised his own food in a challenging Vermont climate. The MAHA movement seeks to reclaim food sovereignty and the intergenerational transfer of the skills, knowledge, and heirloom seeds required to sustain it. That mission begins here in this Bully Pulpit, where people learn more every day about what is wrong with our modern food production, processing, and distribution system, so that they can embrace how to do it right in the future!

John Klar is an attorney, writer, and farmer who works for MAHA Action. John is a staff writer for Liberty Nation News and a regular contributor to the MAHA Report. His Substack is Small Farm Republic. He is the author of The Coming Food Crisis: How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists Are Waging War on Farmers and Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.

I am a 4th-generation farmer, and our family farm, Key Farms, was on the brink of bankruptcy. We are cotton farmers in West Texas. Years of drought and low commodity prices, along with rising input costs, were too much for us to handle. Something had to change. Every year, my hope and prayer was to just break even. That is no way to run a business. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. I had to do something, or we would lose it all.

If you want to talk about pressure, I had it. Imagine knowing that your great-grandfather, grandfather, mom, and dad all kept the family farm going, and I was going to be the one to lose it all. The bank would put the land, equipment, and everything else up for auction. Not to mention the embarrassment of not making it. My grandfather was able to survive the farm crisis in the 1980’s, where interest rates were around 18%. Cotton was everything to our family–it was all we knew. But we were selling cotton for $0.60 a pound, and that was what my grandfather was selling it for in the 1970s (and believe me, the expenses are higher now than they were in the 70s). I had to do something.

So, I tried something new: sheep. I had a family friend raising sheep and had been talking to me about switching to it. So, after a lot of analysis, thought, and prayer, I made the transition. It was better and lasted for several years, but it wasn’t enough. I could make it each year and have a little money left over, but it wasn’t enough to knock out the mountain of prior farm losses that we had incurred for many years.

Then I heard of something crazy: AgriSolar. What’s that, you ask? It’s incorporating agriculture on solar farms. Specifically, grazing my sheep on the solar farms. I was told about the American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA) at solargrazing.org, and it changed my life. There was an entire community out there doing this, and they had educational and technical assistance materials available to help folks new to the community. I would work all day at the farm and come home, and after we put the kids to bed, I would watch different webinars about how solar grazing works. I was consumed by the idea, and I knew it was the answer that my family needed.

Solar companies pay us to manage the vegetation on the solar farms. It’s not as simple as putting sheep out there and letting them eat – that’s what I learned from ASGA. There is a great deal that goes into it. The solar companies have all of this land under the panels that need to be maintained, and water and fencing need to be constantly managed. So, I put my “4-legged lawn mowers” out there and let them do their thing, while I managed and stewarded the land. I made sure they were healthy, optimized the flock for solar, worked with guardian dogs and shepherds, and learned the ins and outs of solar grazing from the ground up.

One of the biggest complaints I hear is that solar companies are taking land out of agricultural production for solar panels. But we are keeping it in agriculture. We are “dual cropping” - we harvest lamb, and they harvest the sun.

AgriSolar has come a long way since I began 4 years ago. In the beginning, companies would laugh at me when I proposed putting sheep out there instead of the traditional zero-turn mowers. Now, it is becoming a more accepted practice thanks to many good graziers and the hard work of ASGA.

We are doing so much more than keeping the grass down with the sheep; we are healing the land. I know what I was doing to our land when I was a traditional row crop farmer. I used synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and growth inhibitors along with multiple mechanical plowings. I wasn’t doing anything to create healthy soils; I was killing my soil. But now, on solar, I am rebuilding the soil with the sheep, naturally fertilizing it. I’m not spraying pesticides, so the insects and bees are thriving, and plants are being pollinated – just how nature intended it to be.

I would’ve never believed it unless I witnessed it firsthand, but the grass actually grows better under the shade of the panels. I know my sheep like having panels to get out of the hot Texas sun. The sheep usually get up at first light and graze until around lunchtime, then go back to water and under the shade of the panels. They stay there until late afternoon, then they graze until dark. It really is a match made in heaven.

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I have a couple of initiatives that I’m pretty excited about. First, I am mentoring several people who are trying to break into AgriSolar. I was mentored by Ely Valdez of South Texas Curbing. Ely is probably the best solar grazier in the country. He took me in under his wing and showed me the ropes. Now, I’m trying to pay that forward by helping others. Secondly, I am about to plant a 20 to 30-acre garden at one of my sites, planning to donate half of the food produced to the local food banks in our community. No matter the struggles our farm has been through, we are strong and resilient, and I always want to help others who are in need of assistance.

As I mentioned, it saved our family farm. I’m not going on lavish vacations or owning multiple homes, but I can make our note payments at the bank and whittle away at the mountain of debt. Most importantly, it allowed our two sons to return to work with us on the family farm. Our oldest, Ross, graduated from college with a business degree and is now working side by side with me to keep everything going smoothly. Jackson, our youngest, is a junior in college and plans to come back and work with us. We’ve even been able to increase our flock a little over the last couple of years.

Chad Raines is President of the American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA).

Big Bend remains one of the largest and most untouched landscapes in Texas. Rugged mountains rise from the desert floor while the Rio Grande cuts a distinct path through canyons and open land. Concrete and steel don’t exactly fit in a landscape like that. It is a place defined by distance, silence, and the dramatic character of the land itself.

Recent debate over border wall construction in the region has made one thing clear: our natural heritage still matters, and Texans across the political spectrum are willing to defend it.

For years, proposals to construct a physical wall through Big Bend National Park and surrounding lands have come and gone. Each time, local communities, conservationists, and policymakers raise concerns, and have made a real impact. Most recently, federal maps removed planned wall construction within the national park itself, which the Texas Tribune reported. This decision reflects growing recognition in Washington and across Texas that although our border security remains important, some places carry a different weight. Big Bend is one of them.

More than almost anyone, Texans understand the need for a secure border, and opposition to a wall in Big Bend doesn’t undermine that. Many live with the results of border security deficiencies every day. The reality is, though, Big Bend is one of the least-trafficked stretches of the southern border. The remote, harsh landscape itself serves as a deterrent, making large-scale migration improbable. Much of this land is privately owned, worked by outdoorsmen and ranchers who have stewarded it for generations.

Ranchers, law enforcement, and local officials all carry that responsibility. In truth, a continuous physical barrier in this region offers limited strategic value but introduces numerous, lasting consequences. Technology offers a more precise approach. Drones, sensors, and mobile surveillance units allow agents to monitor activity without reshaping, scaring, or littering the landscape. This is ultimately just a matter of applying the right tool to the right place.

The costs of getting this wrong are dire. Big Bend supports a fragile and diverse ecosystem shaped over centuries. Wildlife moves freely across the river corridor and the surrounding desert. Construction on the scale required for a border wall would disrupt migration patterns, fragment habitats, and alter the overall character of the land in ways that cannot be undone. Americans set aside national parks to protect them from development and alteration for a reason. Leaders like Theodore Roosevelt understood some places carry a value that cannot be replaced once lost. Big Bend falls squarely in that category. These parks exist for a reason; they protect spaces that define the American landscape and Texas’s identity. Once altered, they do not return to their original form. You cannot reclaim them, and future generations lose connection to the lands that once were.

Voices from across Texas have come together in recent months to make this case, gathering at the state capitol to oppose construction in the region. Leaders on the right and left have called for a more measured approach. Brandon Herrera, for instance, a deeply conservative candidate running for Congress, has repeatedly elevated this issue on the campaign trail while also advocating for strong border security. Protecting Big Bend and other similar areas from a destructive border wall is not a fringe position and not just one held by left-leaning environmentalists with potentially alternative motives. It reflects a broad understanding rooted in common sense and shared values.

American border security is not reliant on a border wall running through Big Bend and Texas does not need to sacrifice its most iconic landscapes to enforce the law. Both priorities can stand together. These are not competing goals but rather responsibilities that demand careful balance. Texans have always understood how to live with the land rather than reshape it beyond recognition. That instinct remains strong today and guides the desire to see Big Bend remain what it has always been: wild, open, and unmistakably Texan.

Stephen Perkins is the chief operating officer at the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). A lifelong Texan, he now resides in San Antonio.

The rise of Ozempic is as much a story of American ingenuity as it is of our culture’s posture toward its food. For every excess pound Americans gain, the pharmaceutical industry is just a few steps behind, developing band-aid after band-aid for our crisis of chronic disease. Yet while our alarm bells only recently began sounding over the obesity epidemic and its cascade of related health issues, the roots of our disordered relationship with food run decades deeper, back to the second wave of feminism and the rise of a convenience-driven culture that ushered in mass dependence on ultra-processed foods. This deeper crisis is not one we can medicate ourselves out of: We are a nation that has deliberately forgotten how to feed itself.

Feeding America well is less about nostalgia than stopping a tangible, observable public health and environmental crisis. By now, data regarding our obesity, hypertension, and related deaths, diseases, and disorders saturates popular discourse almost too deeply to bear repeating, but the fact that our poor health has become a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. Much of this crisis, unsurprisingly, begins in the kitchen. The “cooking illiterate,” a term coined by the New York Times, is reproducing faster than ever, with younger generations decreasingly likely to know how to cook. More than a quarter of millennials say they couldn’t make a cake from a box mix, and under a third of 18-to-29-year-olds say they feel “confident” in the kitchen. It isn’t an issue of free time, either; the COVID-19 lockdowns led to a spike in DoorDash and Uber Eats, not a renaissance of home cooking.

Our obsession with convenience culture is not a coincidence. Rather, it’s the direct result of devaluing work such as homemaking, caregiving, and food preparation, traditionally women’s work, as lesser forms of work. This shift then combined with rising dual-income households to create a cultural and logistical void in domestic food production as households’ mothers entered the workforce. Industrial food companies were all too quick to rush into that void, seeking markets for post-WWII manufacturing capacity. Corporate interests aligned all too conveniently with the “you can have it all” ethos, promoting shelf-stable, processed foods as “freedom” from and “progress” beyond the home. This cultural transformation was hardly intentional; in many ways, it was barely even a conscious one. Nevertheless, markets picked up on our demonstrated preferences, and our homemade food was replaced by manufactured supplements that quickly became substitutes.

Additives and preservatives were marketed as “science,” frozen and boxed meals were sold as “liberation,” and the rise of the microwavable dinners framed speed as ingenuity. Generational skills eroded as cooking, gardening, and food knowledge were outsourced, and food quality plummeted as additives, preservatives, artificial ingredients, refined seed oils, and industrial-scale commodity crops became dietary staples. Systems once centered around nourishment came to serve America’s new favorite god: efficiency.

With our food sequestered away in boxes and plastic, cobwebs began to grow around tables where we soon forgot how to commune. Feeding ourselves became a necessary evil rather than an excuse to socialize, exacerbating America’s declining social capital along with its biomarkers. Rates of metabolic disease climbed along with the number of ingredients in our staple foods and our distance — physical and cognitive — from our foods’ origins. Today, less than a third of children aged 7-11 can identify a beet or a zucchini, though few kids have the same struggle recognizing logos for McDonald’s or M&M’s. The decline in familiarity with food may have begun with the decline in farming and cooking, but it has accelerated over just a few generations to a full-fledged outsourcing of our culinary and nutritional autonomy.

The consequences of our predicament are difficult to overstate. Our country is now unsuccessfully battling parallel rises in childhood chronic disease, allergies, autoimmune disorders, and metabolic illness, and our decline in food literacy means that children who don’t know where food comes from can’t learn from their equally clueless parents. While the biotech industry may be able to patch up some of our health issues, it cannot heal a sick culture. Our loss of connection to food is also an atrophy of cultural rituals, among them shared meals, family identity, and an intergenerational knowledge transfer we cannot rebuild with an injectable, pill, or patch. All of this is underscored by our deteriorating relationship with the land we call home, as industrial food production has increased our land degradation, reliance on synthetic inputs, and biodiversity loss, reinforcing a cycle where the cheapest calories are the least nutritious and most environmentally damaging.

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Making America healthy again will require rewiring the broken systems that have made her sick. We need to fix the regulatory frameworks that make it easier to produce processed food at scale than to support small farms, diversified agriculture, or nutrient-rich perishables. We need to address the permitting barriers currently hindering regional food processing, regenerative farm expansion, and the infrastructure needed for local food systems. Most of all, we need to accept that a healthy America requires aligning food policy with human health and environmental integrity — not just agricultural output — and we need to write agricultural policy that reflects that. Ultimately, success would look like an inversion of the industrial food supply chain that prioritizes export capacity and shelf-stability over nutrient density and ecological health.

And yet policy alone cannot save us. The real work begins in the home, with the deeply pro-human and pro-family pursuits of reclaiming shared meals and rebuilding a relationship with what we eat. Promoting food literacy, normalizing cooking as a basic life skill, and restoring the dignity of the farm and the kitchen are all efforts that will need to begin from the ground up, not an executive order or a farm bill. Restoring agency over the food that sustains our bodies and communities is a project that will take several generations and, if we’re successful, save several more.

America cannot be healthy again until families, communities, and institutions reclaim the ability to produce, prepare, and understand real food. We’re mistaken to believe that the fallout we’re enduring is merely biological, and equally mistaken to believe its solutions are merely political. Our country’s health is a project capable of nourishing a nation starving socially, culturally, and environmentally, if we choose to pursue it. Restoring it promises both the work and the reward of a lifetime.

Danielle Franz is the CEO and a founding member of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and son. Follow her on social media @daniellebfranz.

Much ado has been made about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s draft proposal to end LNT ALARA requirements in nuclear generation and research facilities. LNT ALARA stands for Linear No-Threshold, As Low As Reasonably Achievable, and it refers to safety protocols that workers need to abide by to reduce as much risk as possible to get the job done. No-Threshold means that any exposure to radiation, no matter how small, is a health risk. It assumes that there is no threshold at which radiation exposure is safe. The Linear portion means that risk increases linearly with increased exposure. ‘As Low As Reasonably Achievable’ is thus a policy that seeks to expose workers to the lowest amount of radiation that can possibly be achieved in completing a job. This involves using expensive robots for some jobs, requiring robust PPE for humans, and billions of dollars worth of duplicative infrastructure to shield communities from radiation. Sounds reasonable, right?

The strategy falls apart when one realizes that, in fact, there is a safe threshold for radiation exposure. We receive doses of radiation constantly, whether it be from medical diagnostic tools like X-rays, the radon in our homes, or from general background radiation that exists everywhere in the universe. According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, one receives 1,000 millirems(mrem) of radiation in a CT scan. One can also expect to receive about 228 mrem from radon in your home each year. Surprisingly, the average U.S. adult will be exposed to 310 mrem of ionizing radiation each year simply from background cosmic radiation. To put this in perspective, living near a nuclear plant results in less than 1 mrem each year. Of course, exposure increases dramatically for workers inside these plants, but even a ten-fold increase in mrem exposure for workers doesn’t come anywhere near the normal and safe level of background radiation that we all experience each day. Thus, billions of dollars spent mitigating negligible amounts of radiation only prevent us from having affordable, carbon-free energy and do nothing to mitigate risks to workers.

Imagine, if you will, that we applied the LNT ALARA model to our own lives. We could, for example, approach germs with the same mentality. Under an LNT ALARA model, we could assume that all germs are bad, no matter the quantity or type. Therefore, we would wear a mask 24/7, reduce all personal physical interactions, never take public transportation, and constantly apply hand sanitizing gel wherever we go. This lifestyle would undoubtedly kill us; the vast majority of bacteria and viruses are benign, and many are actually beneficial. Exposure to these germs is worth the risk to live a fulfilling, normal life. On top of that, the continued cost of masks, soap, sanitizers, and other PPE would bankrupt us.

In the nuclear world, this is exactly what happens. Jobs that could be done by one person, which may involve exposure of around 300 mrem (one CT scan), are currently split between three people so as to spread the time spent exposed to radiation. This costs plants three times as much money and time. Billions of dollars are spent on duplicative shielding and concrete barriers that only reduce risk by fractions of a percentage, if at all. Workers are forced to wear PPE like gas masks in areas where radiation exposure is actually below naturally occurring background levels. ALARA also treats tools and PPE (like the already unnecessary gas masks) used in nuclear areas as radioactive waste, which requires extensive and extremely expensive decommissioning processes, despite the fact that the tools are often used in areas with extremely low levels of radiation.

The ALARA regulations, passed in 1975, had an immediate and dramatic effect. Between 1973 and 1980, the cubic yards of concrete in nuclear reactors increased from 90,000 to 162,000. The number of man-hours per kilowatt-hour of energy generated surged from 9.6 in 1972 to 28.5 in 1980. The Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Tennessee, scheduled for completion in 1973 at a cost of $300 million, was completed for $1.7 billion in 1981, after 23 changes to structure or components were requested by the regulator.

Of course, you won’t read any of this granular thinking in the mainstream media. Let us take the opening line of a recent POLITICO article, for example:

This type of doomsday rhetoric underscores not only how little the general public understands about these regulations but also the extent to which this decision has become politicized rather than being based on scientific evidence. Removing radiation protections appears, on its face, to be wanton ignorance of the dangers of nuclear energy, and the mainstream media relishes any chance it gets to attack the current administration. By framing ALARA regulations as some sort of sacrosanct, timeless provision, they errantly show their bias. There is little reverence, and perhaps scorn, for much older laws, so this narrative very obviously shows that the clear disdain is motivated by something other than the science.

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Thankfully, there are incredibly smart people working hard behind the scenes on these issues. In January, Secretary Wright issued a memorandum that ended all ALARA protocols at DOE, citing a 2025 report by the Idaho National Laboratory that recommended the cessation of ALARA requirements. The Nuclear Innovation Alliance puts its best when they say we ought to “mend, and not end,” the programs. While exposure to extra levels of radiation certainly does carry a risk, there is a safe threshold at which there is a negligible risk. By reducing the draconian and costly requirements for practices under acceptable risk thresholds, we can significantly cut down on the cost and time of building the reactors our nation so desperately needs.

Taylor Tougaw is the Director of Government Affairs at the American Conservation Coalition Action (ACC Action).