As Chair of the Harvey Broome Group, I continue to urge all Sierra Club members to become active in opposing the Trump administration's unprecedented attacks on laws and regulations enacted by Congress to protect the environment, as well as the attacks on agency personnel whose jobs are to administer and enforce these laws.

Trump and DOGE have gutted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which enforces the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Superfund Act, as well as the Department of the Interior, which enforces the Surface Mining Act (for coal), the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and also manages the National Park System. Trump has also fired experienced environmental lawyers and Inspectors General from the EPA, the Department of the Interior (DOI), the Justice Department, and U.S. Attorney's Offices, where these laws are enforced in federal courts. He is making it nearly impossible to implement these laws, thereby allowing industrial and other polluters to damage the environment with impunity. He has also caused the removal of interactive pages from federal websites related to climate change and environmental justice. 

In the Department of the Interior, Trump has opened millions of acres of protected public lands and the offshore continental shelf to oil and gas leasing. He recently opened 13 million acres of federal lands to more coal mining and is pushing to restart obsolete, polluting, and expensive coal-fired power plants. His MAGA House and Senate supporters are still trying to legislatively order a massive sell-off of public lands to offset their tax breaks for millionaires. His complicit Supreme Court has recently weakened the standards for complying with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), meaning that there will be less stringent reviews of proposed development projects on Federal Lands.

His minions at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have proposed changing the definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act to exclude habitat destruction—the primary way in which threatened and endangered species are harmed. His U.S. Forest Service minions have announced a vastly expanded production of timber from National Forests while also cutting the budget for forest firefighters. He has again withdrawn the United States from the international Paris Accord climate treaty and has cut all funding and tax incentives for electric vehicles and solar power. He continues to deny that climate change is happening or caused by human pollution, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and his EPA chief has proposed reversing the “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act that forms the basis for EPA to promulgate rules regulating CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.   

In short, the Trump Administration is a disaster for the human and natural environment. It threatens the entire system of environmental and public lands protections that Congress has enacted over the last sixty years. It is madness: Protecting the profits of industry in the short run to guarantee the destruction of the environment in the long run.

The Sierra Club, Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the Environmental Defense Fund, among others, have filed dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration and have achieved considerable success. For instance, EarthJustice's suit against the USDA for deleting climate data from its website resulted in the USDA restoring the data. A lawsuit by the NRDC led to the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington  issuing a preliminary injunction, lifting the Trump administration's unlawful freeze on federal funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program. Several courts have ordered the Trump administration to spend money appropriated by Congress for environmental programs and personnel that it had illegally impounded, but the Supreme Court has recently allowed Trump to go forward with many of his firings and personnel cuts.

So, what can you do to help? You can financially support the Sierra Club and the environmental law groups mentioned above in their efforts to thwart Trump's actions. You can write or call your Congressional representatives and respectfully but heartily protest. You can write letters to the editors of newspapers, put statements on your blog posts or social media sites, and show up for public protests. The worst thing you can do is to sit it out and hope the nightmare ends.

Without your activism and that of millions of other Americans, there is no chance of reversing the disaster that Trump is bringing to the American people and the world.