How 'Nature is Nonpartisan' is Greenwashing the Trump Administration
In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth".
Listeners of this podcast might be surprised to find out that people are not exactly knocking down my door to appear on Ecosystem Member. I rarely get pitched guests and it is even rarer that I accept the pitches I do receive because they tend to be written as if they were the output of a machine rather than a thinking human mind. The formulaic emails usually pitch guests who aren’t relevant or topics that fall outside of the remit of our relationship with nature.
On Thursday, however, I did receive one of those rare pitches for a guest who would be completely relevant if I didn’t suspect that he and his organization was full of shit.
The pitch was from a new group calling itself ‘Nature is Nonpartisan’.
The Washington Post reported that the group is behind the recent Trump administration Executive Order misleadingly titled “Make America Beautiful Again.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday seeking to “Make America Beautiful Again,” establishing a council tasked with conserving public lands, protecting wildlife populations and ensuring clean drinking water while remaining silent on climate change.
For an administration that has largely focused on rolling back climate regulations and boosting the oil industry, the order is a first nod at outlining a cohesive environmental policy. The move is the culmination of a months-long campaign by Benji Backer, a 27-year-old self-described conservative environmentalist, who brought a draft of the order to the White House in February.
Backer, the proposed Ecosystem Member guest to talk about the group’s work, comes across as the influential infiltrator who finally got the administration to formulate an environmental policy.
While reveling the group’s role and Backer’s influence, The Post’s piece continues to point out the lack of any mention of climate change in the language of the Executive Order and absence of it in the role of the commission it establishes.
The document does not mention climate change, which many leading scientists consider the biggest threat to the environment, or identify measures to curb planet-warming pollution.
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The Make America Beautiful Again Commission will include the heads of the EPA, the Interior Department and other relevant agencies. It will make policy recommendations to the president to recover wildlife “through collaboration rather than regulation,” improve aquatic ecosystems and access to clean drinking water, and expand access to public lands and promote recreation.
As a reminder, the head of the EPA is Lee Zeldin. The same Lee Zeldin who the League of Conservation Voters gives a score of 14% from his time in the House and “has withheld billions of dollars in climate funds approved by Congress, tried to fire hundreds of employees, recommended the elimination of thousands more E.P.A. scientists, and started trying to repeal dozens of environmental regulations that limit toxic pollution. He has filled the leadership ranks at the agency with lobbyists and lawyers from industries that have fought environmental regulations.”
Yet Backer tells The Post that the EPA head told him, “I want my legacy to be someone who cares about the environment.” Maybe he meant “cares for the environment“ the same way Hannibal Lecter cares about his next meal.
Zeldin will be joined on the commission by Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior who recently told a House committee that we have ‘plenty of time’ to address the climate crisis. Leading scientists vehemently disagree.
To put it simply, actions speak louder than words and the Trump administration has led the single greatest destruction of the protection of nature and the rollback of the biggest investment to fight climate change in US history. Nature as a physical space may be nonpartisan, but the protection of nature and its living entities clearly is. There is one party that has voted to protect nature and pass legislation to fight climate change and one party that has done the exact opposite. (For more on the details of the Executive Order, I highly recommend
’s piece “Greenwashing, Grifters, And Useful Idiots Won’t Make America Beautiful Again”)Aside from the obvious issues with the administration Backer is providing advice to, ‘Nature is Nonpartisan’ has built an uneven public case to support its name.
On the positive side, The Post reports that it has both Republican and Democrat advisors. But - and it is a big but - when ‘Nature is Nonpartisan’ held a recent meeting in Arizona with major environmental non-profits, it didn’t invite the Sierra Club or Natural Resources Defense Council according to The Post, which classifies the organizations as more liberal.
Again, actions speak louder than words. While Backer was engaging the administration and keeping progressive groups at arms length, a real grassroots coalition of the interested stepped up to take action. Groups from across the political and nature spectrum raised such a fuss that Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee had to remove his provision to sell off public lands from the Trump administration’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill”.
Wanting to engage the pitch in the spirit of nonpartisanship generated by Lee’s loss, I clicked the link in the email to Backer’s Fox News opinion piece published last week. Let’s walk through it together.
Benji Backer: “As Americans pushed west, we learned to work with the land.”
Me: Looking back at my history class notes from grade school, native Americans were already in America. They didn’t push West, if anything they were pushed out of the West to make room for the nation of immigrants that would follow. And those Native Americans already knew how to work with the land. (See:
’s Substack for more details.) Further, the outdated notion of Manifest Destiny that this implies is straight out of Trump’s playbook.BB: “We established national parks to protect the diverse geography that spans the nation and fuel economic prosperity.”
Me: In 1872, Congress established Yellowstone National Park (the first National Park), designating the land in Montana and Wyoming, "as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act that created the National Park Services.
the Service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments and reservations…by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
Funny, I can’t find anywhere where the creators said we established National Parks to ‘fuel economic prosperity’. However, I did find a page on Senator Lee’s website titled ‘Promoting Prosperity’ that details how he supports further oil drilling in Alaska’s Outer-Continental Shelf (OCS), increased drilling on public lands for oil and gas, and the elimination of greenhouse gas regulations.
BB: “But for the last several decades, the environment has become engulfed in partisan culture wars. As a result, our nation’s leaders have increasingly failed to enact durable, long-lasting, and balanced environmental policies. A subject matter that once transcended partisan politics and brought leaders from all sides together has seen little to no substantial progress in the modern political era.”
Me: Have you heard of the Inflation Reduction Act? You know, the act that President Biden signed that is routinely called “most important climate law in US history." And much of what it accomplished to protect nature would still be in place if not for the Trump administration’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill”.
In fact, Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency said, “I want to make it clear: the Inflation Reduction Act is the single most important climate action since the Paris Agreement in 2015.”
We’re only at paragraph two, but I think you can see that Backer’s supposed nonpartisan approach is about as partisan as it gets.
As the pushback against Senator Lee’s attempt to sell our public lands shows, nature might actually be a nonpartisan issue, but the group ‘Nature is Nonpartisan’ appears to be anything but.
The ‘Make America Beautiful Again’ Executive Order that Backer’s group originated is nothing more than a fig leaf to help the Trump administration continue to exploit our wild spaces and public lands for economic gain. When given the chance to acknowledge the IRA and its efforts to protect nature, Backer wiped it from history just like the Trump administration has tried to do.
I work in marketing and advertising. I got fired for refusing to help greenwash oil and gas and mining companies. I know greenwashing when I see it, and it’s plain to see that Backer’s organization is nothing more than a brush to paint this administration and the current Republican party green to cover its multitude of environmental sins.
I want to end with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, a man that Republicans love to claim as their own, even though he was a key leader in the Progressive Era and would likely not identify with either political party today.
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
So in reply to your pitch, Benji and ‘Nature is Nonpartisan’, I’d be glad to have you on the podcast if I believed you’d do your patriotic duty to tell the truth about the real aims of your organization and your relationship not just with nature, but with the Trump administration. Thus far, your work is unconvincing in word and deed.