Civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment have always been my main concerns, and I lived through times of great progress, making it difficult to continue maintaining hope as these gains are lost. I remember, as a child, watching all of it — from Selma to Earth Day. Some of the people who are dismantling the progress must have been watching too. You need to be at least 70 years old to remember the protests, the music, the three assassinations that forever weakened America, the immoral war that used my classmates like firewood, the struggle between closing or widening the divisions that tear us apart.

But the policy victories were great. As an environmental science student in the 1970s, I was thrilled to see one piece of major legislation after another signed into law. The Clean Air Act. Clean Water Act. Toxic Substances Control Act. Endangered Species Act. Fishery Conservation and Management Act. America understood the problems. America cared. America was fixing the broken, polluting pipes of its leaking future. My future. And America was leading the world by example, and there was no need for maintaining hope.

And now things are going backward, making it increasingly difficult to maintain hope. The following brief retrospective of just a few things will illustrate the point.

After the EPA issued limits on emissions in 2024, mercury levels in fish began falling. In February, that action was reversed.

Living on the Atlantic coast, I fish and eat our catch. Mercury has long been a concern. My blood level has been high at times. Mercury is an impurity in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Coal smokestacks are where the mercury in our fish comes from. In 2012 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued air standards that cut mercury emissions by 90 percent and emissions of other metals by 80 percent. Mercury levels in fish began falling. In 2024 the EPA further strengthened those rules, setting stricter limits. But early in 2026, the EPA undid the 2024 standards, making it difficult to maintain hope and allowing more mercury and metals into the air. The Trump Administration has extended subsidies and issued orders to prop up our coal-burning comrades and has given 68 coal plants a two-year exemption from complying with mercury standards. Burning coal also results in the toxic sludge called coal ash, which has also been regulated. But in 2026, the EPA announced it was relaxing monitoring and extending cleanup of coal ash sites by up to three years, making it more and more difficult to maintain hope.

Read the full article about maintaining hope in the face of climate change by Carl Safina at Yale Environment 360.