The first full draft of the assessment, on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife, was weeks from completion. The project leader called the study “too important to die.”
The draft was almost ready for submission, due in less than a month. More than 150 scientists and other experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on the report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States.
But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. So, on Jan. 30, the project’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email telling members of his team that their work had been discontinued.
But it wasn’t the only email he sent that day.
“This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in a separate email to the reports’ authors, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we are producing.”
Now key experts who worked on the report, called the National Nature Assessment, are figuring out how to finish and publish it outside the government, according to interviews with nine of the leading authors.
“There’s an amazingly unanimous broad consensus that we ought to carry on with the work,” said Howard Frumkin, a professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Washington School of Public Health who was leading a chapter on nature’s effects on human health and well-being.
The study was intended to measure how the nation’s lands, water and wildlife are faring, how they are expected to change, and what that means for people.