Where we stand.

I’ve been avoiding dipping my oars too deeply into the ongoing chaos – as I’m sure that I would add little to the tempest of punditry trying to hold on to this particular herd of bucking broncos.

Suffice it to say that it has become abundantly clear to me that there is no “plan” to “Make America Great Again;” rather there is only the objective to crash the whole thing – likely toward the intent of pawing through the detritus and selling anything recovered that might have some economic value.

While OCR continues to advance what we consider meaningful work; for all of us in the conservation business, the ground is shifting (or the tides are turning…). The Agencies we have interacted with – NOAA, NMFS, EPA, and BOEM are all getting seriously pruned and redirected.

Friends and colleagues are losing their jobs. Key regulations which have provided us handles to these agencies – the National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, are all being “streamlined” by providing exceptions to the very industries these laws have been successfully regulating for 50 years.

While we haven’t depended on any Federal funding up to this point, we were anticipating a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) to advance our whale/ship-strike project. NFWF manages and disburses Federal funds to conservation projects.

Fortunately we have a healthy international profile with our membership on international standards committees, and ~60% of our “social networking” followers hailing from all over the planet.

But what we find particularly troubling in our “Not for profit, Public benefit” business is the intimations that the “Administration” is planning on revoking the “Non-profit” determinations from organizations that don’t harmonize with their agenda.

All of us are speculating about how far this will go, or what it will look like once it collapses. What we can attempt to do is navigate the turbulence with grace and kindness – perhaps for no other reason than it is completely anathema to how we are being tormented to react – by both the instigators and the Press.

But however this falls apart, grace and kindness will be useful as we reassemble it into the governance we will need.

Grace and kindness is what happened after 1929, when the oligarchs crashed it the first time. It took a few years, but the nation did get on the right track with the 40 hour work-week, child labor laws, “minimum wage,” Social Security, Federal funding for education and the arts, and reasonable tax rates on people who pay themselves much more money than they could ever, ever spend.

– Humanity over hubris.