Blue Green and Between 4/28/25: Why the Bad Guys are Cruel, Hardest Hit Science Funding Areas, Write an Op-Ed, and More!

Every week I share feature articles, news, tools, and actions to help everyone protect and enjoy our wonderful planet, from the sea to the sky and everything in between.

Elizabeth Moore

Apr 28, 2025

A deer in the cliffs above Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. Image: Matt McIntosh/NOAA

In this week's issue:

Something Important: Why the Bad Guys Are Cruel
Something Important: Score One for Science and Conservation
Something New: Hardest Hit Science Funding Areas
Something To Do: Write an Op Ed for Your Local Paper
Something to Enjoy: A Jaunt in a Giant Bird Costume
Something Quick

#bluegreenbetween #theoceanisforeveryone #conservation #parksandrec

100% Human-Written, Always!

small brown birds sit on lines of barbed wire — Image: Kiran Rawal via Scop.io

Something Important: Why the Bad Guys Are Cruel

Mean emails that advised federal employees to give up their "low productivity" public jobs for "high productivity" ones in the private sector or informed them that their skill sets were no longer useful for public service.

Overly complicated, deliberately chaotic procurement processes that are designed to keep federal employees from committing funds for necessary contracts, supplies, and services and demoralize them with busy work.

Deliberately tampering with and delaying paperwork that fired/rehired/fired federal employees need to file for unemployment benefits and other help.

These are only a few examples of the deliberate meanness that the Bad Guys have inflicted on NOAA and other federal employees, a sadism that seems gleeful and far out of proportion to what it purports to be: a downsizing of government.

Why is that? Some may think it's a result of the times in which we live, ones that are reportedly lacking in empathy and rife with schadenfreude. We're all being meaner to each other because we are exhausted from the pandemic and tired of striving for things we can never attain, driven on by social media.

Others think that this is a SOP for the Bad Guys, who have campaigned on and continue to stoke outrage in their base by othering groups of people--pretty much anyone who isn't an American, cis-gender, white, Christian male--as their enemies. When you start hating and dehumanizing people, it's easy to make that your day-to-day schtick.

Also, it's no secret that the Bad Guys are using the machinery of government to take their personal revenge on anyone they think wronged them: anyone who investigated or prosecuted them, anyone who wrote an opinion they didn't like, anyone who questioned their decisions or didn't blindly go along with their efforts. Some targets of "DOGE" and the other Bad Guys are the experts and agencies who regulated or oversaw their activities, because it was their job to do so. But being told "no," well, the Bad Guys don't like that.

Cruelty is easy, too, way easier to simply and casually dismiss people who are different than you than to accord them respect and dignity. That takes effort and some of the Bad Guys just don't want to carry that burden any more. See for example this article from New York Magazine that ends with a statement from a man who joined up with the Bad Guys because they don't mind him using derogatory terms for some people that most of us wouldn't even consider saying.

I believe all these reasons are accurate, but I also think there is one more. Unless someone is truly sociopathic (which is estimated to be about 1% of the population), they make a choice to be a Bad Guy. For the most part, the people I knew and worked with in federal service were Good Guys, people who chose to serve their country, people who were more interested in helping their fellow Americans than making a buck off them, people who had callings, not just careers. They were mostly decent, kind, empathetic human beings. I imagine that nothing infuriates a Bad Guy more than a Good Guy who shows them what they haven't the strength of character to be.

And how will a Bad Guy react except with wanton and petty vindictiveness?

A photo from 1970 shows three little girls standing together. Two wear signs around their necks that say I am a flower I'm extinct and I am a kitten I'm extinct. — Children celebrating the first Earth Day in 1970 in New York City. Image: Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Something Important: Score One for Science and Conservation

I thought it was one of the most consequential projects of the Biden Administration, the first ever US National Nature Assessment, an "assessment of the condition of nature within the United States" called for by an executive order on Earth Day 2022. But like many other vitally important scientific projects and enterprises of the federal government, the Bad Guy's administration ordered the work on the project to stop soon after the inauguration. Today, where the project used to live on the website of the Global Change Research Program, we find the message "Page Not Found." In four months of bone-headed, short-sighted, breathlessly ignorant decisions, this was certainly among the worst.

That's why was I was so excited to see the announcement on Earth Day last week that the folks involved in the project have decided to continue the project outside the government under a new partnership called United By Nature.

The National Nature Assessment is the kind of work that our federal government and all its science agencies would normally be doing. But we are not in a normal time. We can't rely on an administration that has its heart set on the destruction of our institutions and democratic norms. And we can't afford to wait for the times I know are coming when we will be rebuilding the ecological and economic wreck coming out of this administration. Last week in this newsletter I predicted that one day retired federal employees will be called upon to help in that reconstruction. I stand by that prediction, but we also don't have to wait. We can act now as many of us have. I'm so glad that these courageous scientists are doing just that!

three scientists stand and sit beside a frame made of plastic pipes laid over a section of an intertideal zone — Intertidal monitoring in Cabrillo National Monument. Image: Michael Ready/National Park Service

Something New: Hardest Hit Science Funding Areas

Speaking of the destruction of our scientific enterprise, Scientific American has just published an article outlining some of the hardest hit areas of funding, including nearly 800--800--projects funded by NIH. It's a hefty and thoroughly depressing read but a necessary one.

Something To Do: Write an Op Ed for Your Local Paper

Science is under attack. So are our science agencies, parks and protected areas, environmental laws, and other facets of our conservation infrastructure. Wonder what's one simple thing you can do to help? Write an opinion piece for your local newspaper, an idea being championed by a new organization called Science Homecoming. They offer resources to help you find the right newspapers to contact and prepare your opinion piece.

a Eurasian curlew, a brown and beige wading birds with a long thin beak, stands on grass beside water — Eurasian curlew. Image: Caroline Legg via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Something To Enjoy: A Jaunt in a Giant Bird Costume

Sometimes when you care so much about something, you must just say what the hell and go for it. I love that a man named Matt Trevelyan put on a giant bamboo and muslin costume of a Eurasian curlew and walked more than 50 miles near Yorkshire, England to call attention to the plight of the bird. The curlews are listed for the UK's highest conservation priority. Now that's the creative way to call attention to something you care about!