Michelle Nijhuis: Conservation is such a long-term undertaking, and it requires a lot of experience. Every place, of course, is different, so it requires a lot of familiarity with a place over time, a lot of trial and error usually over time, and it is so frustrating to see one of the agencies that had that experience. It is so frustrating to see the agency demolished and to see that knowledge scattered, that accumulated knowledge scattered. And so I would just suggest to people that it’s a long-term undertaking, and the demise of U-S-A-I-D deserves your long-term attention, both your long-term attention on the health effects and your long-term attention on the conservation effects, because they are going to continue to ripple outward and they’re going to continue to deepen and become more obvious.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast we speak with Michelle Nijhuis, an environmental journalist and author with work in publications such as The Atlantic, National Geographic, High Country News, and Biographic, the latter of which features her recent reporting on the state of conservation funding a year on from the shuttering of the former development agency, U-S-A-I-D, sometimes referred to as USAID, which stands for the United States Agency for International Development. Nijhuis explains that while the agency was primarily involved in initiatives surrounding development, food aid, and human health, it was also one of the world’s largest financial contributors to conservation. Its closure is estimated to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and also the stoppage of millions of dollars towards biodiversity protection and funding for some of the largest conservation organizations in the world. Nijhuis speaks with me about these impacts, what organizations are doing in the short term to close the funding gap, why it could be decades before we know the full impact of these funding cuts, and also why we may never know some of them at all. There are bright spots in the effort to keep conservation programs above water. Former USAID staffers are coming together to pair some of the most impactful projects with external funding. Overall, Nijhuis emphasizes that long-term knowledge of place, people, and culture is at the heart of much conservation work, and that the loss of USAID deserves your long-term attention, and there are ways in which people can help. Michelle Nijhuis, welcome back to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you back.

Michelle: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Mike: So the first thing I’d like to ask you is, can you contextualize for us how USAID started getting involved in biodiversity protection? So we know that the agency was created by former President John F. Kennedy, but it didn’t start out on conservation per se. So can you contextualize the background of that for us?

Michelle: That’s right. U-S-A-I-D started out as a provider of food aid, a provider of health services, and a provider of education. And that was, and is still, what it was best known for, and what it spent most of its budget on. When it was shut down by the Trump administration in early 2025, that was still what it was best known for and what it spent most of its budget on. However, over time, people working for U-S-A-I-D and its supporters in Congress recognized that conservation, a healthy environment, was also a very important part of human health, and Congress started dedicating a small portion of USAID’s budget to conservation of habitats, conservation of wildlife, and other activities that were seen as contributing holistically to human health around the world. And this was a tiny part of USAID’s budget, and USAID’s overall budget was a tiny part of the overall federal budget. However, it was enough money, about $400 million at the end, to make USAID one of the largest providers of conservation funding in the world.

Mike: So let’s fast forward then to January 20th, 2025. Trump suspends international development funds within hours of being inaugurated, and conservation funding was part of that, I believe, if I have that correctly. It was halted. So I think we should start by acknowledging that U-S-A-I-D was key for human health in many of the nations that the cuts that the Trump administration enacted happened in. And in one analysis it’s estimated to have led to the deaths of 834,000 people, two thirds of them children. I just want to acknowledge that here. Can you detail for us what the negative impacts of the USAID cuts were in terms of human health and also biodiversity protection?

Michelle: Yeah. And I’m really glad you started out by acknowledging that because, as I said, the majority, the vast majority, of USAID’s budget was spent on food aid and direct aid for human health. And it has a proud history. Of course, USAID was not a perfect agency by any means, but it does have a proud history of some really successful initiatives, support for HIV-AIDS treatment, malaria control. Other initiatives have saved an estimated 91 million lives just over the past 20 years. And as you said, these cuts are estimated to have already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. So it’s a real, it’s a human tragedy. It’s a human health emergency that’s ongoing. And I think it’s important to establish that as the context before we start talking about conservation. If anyone who’s listening wants to get an overview of what’s been lost with the dismantlement of U-S-A-I-D, I highly recommend the March 8th episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. It’s like the best satire. It will make you laugh, but it will also inform you and really enrage you about just the meaninglessness of the suffering that has been caused by the just abrupt disappearing of U-S-A-I-D. But one thing that episode does not mention is what’s happened to conservation. Those $400 million that were going toward really creative, in many cases creative, successful conservation projects in some of the most endangered habitats in the world were also stopped abruptly. And some of the effects we’re already seeing, but some of the effects are going to be much slower to appear, much harder to measure, and in many ways we will not know what we’ve lost.

Mike: You highlighted an example of eco-guards in Liberia and wildlife rangers in other areas. Can you describe what happened to those rangers and those organizations?

Michelle: Yeah. The eco-guard program in Liberia is one relatively small example of the kinds of programs around the world that have been threatened or suspended because of the disappearance of U-S-A-I-D. So the Society for the Conservation of Nature of Liberia, which is the country’s oldest conservation organization, had recruited and trained a corps of about 80 people to help protect the Liberian forest, which is some of the richest forests on the planet. And these were people who lived in the forest, lived in villages in the forest, and they were able to earn a livelihood in many cases from this work. And they supported professional park and forest rangers by acting as extra eyes in the forest, patrolling for signs of illegal activity like illegal mining, illegal hunting, and passing on this information that could then be acted on. And when U-S-A-I-D was destroyed by the Trump administration, the Society for the Conservation of Nature of Liberia was informed, your funding is gone. And the staff of that organization had to travel over rough roads for several hours to deliver this news to these several dozen eco-guards who were earning a living doing this very important work to protect the forest. And you can imagine how bewildering it must have been to have one of your collaborators, a person who had offered you this meaningful work, show up and say, we don’t understand it either, but this agency that was helping provide this money is just gone from one day to the next. It’s just disappeared, and we’re sorry, but we no longer have the money to pay you. And then the park and forest rangers, who had come to count on that support, no longer have it either. So in that case, that program has been able to get some emergency funding from international NGOs, but the future of the eco-guard program, like the future of many other organizations like it, is incredibly uncertain.

Mike: We’re going to come back to that example because I do want to talk more about what they did to, at least in the short to medium term, manage to sustain themselves. But there was a forest protection program in the Congo Basin, and it was one of USAID’s biggest projects. Can you describe this program and the impacts the cuts had on it?

Michelle: Yeah. It was one of its oldest and most enduring conservation endeavors, and it really brought attention to the Congo Basin, the world’s attention to the Congo Basin, as one of the several globally significant rainforests, and a very important carbon sink to all of us who depend on a stable climate, and of course very rich habitat for many kinds of wildlife. And so USAID’s presence in the Congo Basin helped support conservation even through times of conflict, of war. They were able to support local people on the ground who were trying to protect forests through some very terrible times. And they were also able to support technical work like mapping, just knowing what the extent of the forest was, what damage might be done to it. And these are things that just were not possible without the support of USAID. And they also acted, and this is what I heard from a lot of people I spoke with, USAID was able to act as an information hub for conservation information in many places around the world. They brought together expertise in conservation, in social sciences, in development work, and then they funded not only their own staff, but they funded other organizations who were then able to go to USAID for different kinds of technical support and share information about what was working and not working in the communities where they were practicing conservation. So that kind of convening function was also lost in the Congo Basin. And work is, of course, continuing because people who were funded by USAID are by and large incredibly dedicated to their conservation work. They’re finding ways to go on, but there’s a real scramble to figure out how to persist and how to continue some of this higher-level, or just larger-scope, work that was being done in the Congo Basin, where work was being connected across the region.

Mike: And again, we’ll get into a little bit more detail about what actions they’re taking to sustain some of this program. But I want to talk about the fact that some of the largest conservation organizations, or NGOs, in the world were major recipients of USAID funding. So can you describe what these organizations were and explain the impact of the USAID cuts to them?

Michelle: Yeah. And this was something that really became clear to me through the course of reporting this story. I’ve reported on conservation for a long time, but I was not aware of the extent of USAID support for organizations that I think any person in North America who’s interested in conservation will have heard of: the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund. All of them were supported with tens of millions of dollars of USAID funding. Those organizations, unlike the smaller organizations, local organizations on the ground, they have deep enough pockets to be able to continue, but some were forced to lay off staffers, some were forced to cut certain regional programs. And it was certainly a wake-up call even for those large organizations that work around the world. It was a wake-up call that an organization they had depended on literally for decades was no longer there as a source of really fundamental resources that they could count on.

Mike: I was looking at the list and I think I saw that these amounts were in the millions, like for some organizations, is that right?

Michelle: Yes.

Mike: Yeah.

Michelle: Yeah. Millions and tens of millions.

Mike: Yeah. It’s no small amount to an NGO. And it took me by surprise as well when I was reading through your story. There is an example that you bring up about the Endangered Wildlife Trust, which lost $1.2 million, I believe, to help combat rhino poaching in South Africa. And a researcher at the University of Cape Town told you that USAID was actually doing a really good job at working with local communities on this. So I would love for you to detail what USAID was doing with this initiative, how effective it was, and the loss that has been experienced by these cuts.

Michelle: Yeah, just a little bit of context. As you said, USAID goes back to the Kennedy administration, and it always was a form of humanitarian aid, but also a form of soft power. And USAID has been criticized over the years by many people who thought it was too close to the governments that it worked with, sometimes not close enough, not collaborative enough with the governments it worked with, and that it engaged in conservation practices that were too top down, that were not aware of local practices, or imposing things that were not appropriate, not culturally appropriate, or just not practical on situations where the staffers were not fully aware of what was going on. And I think many of those criticisms are very well founded. But I also, through talking to people who had received USAID funding and who worked for USAID in recent years, I think the agency was moving in a genuinely positive direction in terms of just being much more aware of the need for community-led conservation, understanding that if the goal was to stop wildlife trafficking, any illegal hunting of wildlife, it was not enough to simply plunk a bunch of rangers on the ground and hope for the best, that those kinds of changes are whole-of-society changes, and you have to address them on many different levels. Annette Hübschle, who is a researcher at the University of Cape Town, who you referred to, was complimenting USAID’s approach, its approach to rhino trafficking in South Africa, saying that, yes, USAID has funded ranger patrols, but it’s also funded experiments in restorative justice where people who are arrested for relatively small infractions of wildlife laws, maybe they’re hunting for their families, they are placed in diversionary programs where they’re encouraged not to escalate their activities, and that has had some really promising results in turning people away from illegal hunting as a means of subsistence and then a means of making money. So I think it’s especially tragic that USAID was making all this progress. And in fact the director of USAID during the Biden administration, Samantha Power, led the production of this very forward-looking report about the need for more locally led conservation. And that was published at the end of 2024, just literally weeks before the Trump administration pulled the plug on the whole agency.

Mike: And can you describe what the community in and around Cape Town has felt in the wake of the cuts from this anti-poaching program that USAID had?

Michelle: This program was throughout South Africa. And it’s really too soon. Most of the people I talked to have said it’s really too soon to measure, to have anything more than anecdotes just in terms of how animals have suffered, how communities have suffered. But certainly people who were working for ranger patrols funded by USAID have lost their positions, have lost their livelihood, and that is compounded in many cases by the fact that they’re losing health assistance and education assistance that was also brought to their rural communities by USAID. So it’s a double or even a triple blow for folks who are on the conservation front lines. And then these longer-term programs, like the restorative justice experiments I mentioned, those are lost opportunities to really make lasting progress against wildlife trafficking, illegal hunting, really deeply embedded societal problems like that. And we may never be able to measure what was lost on that front.

Mike: If I may say, I think that I’ve detected a theme here, that while there’s definitely immediate devastating impacts from these USAID cuts, it seems like in many cases you’ve highlighted that we won’t fully know the damage until decades from now. Would you agree with that?

Michelle: Definitely. And I mean, we won’t know the damage for decades, and we may never know the full damage because a lot of this is about lost opportunities, the great ideas that, because they were so abruptly cut off, didn’t get a chance to gain momentum. We’ll, I’m sure, get to a discussion of things that people are doing to try to continue those initiatives, but there are some that won’t get a chance. And that, to me, is one of the most tragic aspects of all this.

Mike: Hello listeners, and thank you for tuning in. Michelle Nijhuis has shared some resources for you to view regarding efforts to sustain USAID projects. These can be viewed in the show notes. Also, if you would like to read her latest book, Beloved Beasts, it’s linked in the show notes as well. Thank you very much, and back to the conversation with Michelle Nijhuis. Another region impacted by the USAID cuts, which our audience and I’m quite familiar with, is the Leuser ecosystem in Sumatra. Can you describe what happened here?

Michelle: I have not been there myself, and so I would love to hear from you what you’ve seen both before and after the presence of USAID. As many people know, there’s been a lot of logging of the rainforest for oil palm plantations, with really dire effects for local communities. There have been fatal floods and landslides and just the real transformation of local rivers. And USAID, again, as I said, the role it often played was as a sort of convening institution where it brought together people who were working in different communities and helped them share information across distances or perhaps across languages, and enabled people to collaborate in ways they might not have otherwise. And I know in the Leuser ecosystem, USAID facilitated this planning process that mapped conservation areas and ensured that local farmers were represented alongside these very powerful palm oil companies. It helped allow farmers’ voices to be heard in a way they would not have otherwise. The palm oil companies would have literally and figuratively just bulldozed through the process. And that’s another process that is no longer there because of the shutdown of USAID. So the ability to allow people to speak to power with some chance of being heard and heeded has been taken away. And that, of course, has really dire consequences for people as well as for ecosystems and the ecosystems they depend on.

Mike: For more people that are interested to learn about the Leuser ecosystem, we do have a podcast series on Sumatra, and I will link that in the show notes. I want to discuss the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya with you. That was impacted as well. What happened with the Northern Rangelands Trust?

Michelle: Yeah. Many listeners may be familiar with the Northern Rangelands Trust. It’s been around for a very long time and it was one of the pioneers of community-led conservation, and worked across Kenya with communities and provided incentives. It really enabled people to practice conservation. It shifted the burdens and the rewards of conservation, so to speak, so that it became more possible for people. And the Northern Rangelands Trust had been struggling with some internal controversy in the year before USAID was dismantled, and so it was already in a vulnerable position. And then USAID, it was one of the organizations that received a lot of money from USAID, and it was just really devastating to the work of the Northern Rangelands Trust. The organization still exists and is still continuing, but it was just a devastating blow at a really terrible time. And as one of the former Northern Rangelands Trust staffers I spoke with, Daudi Ofo, said, he said USAID was the glue that helped bring people together for dialogue, not only within the Northern Rangelands Trust, but across northern Kenya, where there has been a lot of stress on people due to these deep droughts. There’s been a lot of armed conflict for many different reasons. And USAID played an important peacemaking and convening function in the region. So all of that has really affected the Northern Rangelands Trust and their long, really exemplary work in community-led conservation.

Mike: You spoke anonymously with a former USAID employee, and they said something that I think is incredibly important to highlight. And I’m quoting them directly: “So many of the things that threaten conservation have to do with poverty.” I think this is important to discuss. Can you share more about what they told you and how USAID was helping in this regard?

Michelle: Yeah, and I was really struck by that statement too, and it’s something that the institutional conservation movement has belatedly started to recognize in the past decade or so. But I would say for most of the conservation movement’s 150-year history, and I would say the institutional conservation movement, of course not conservation in general, conservationists have not been as attentive as they should be to the fact that poverty underlies most conservation problems. And USAID was unusual in that it started as a development agency, remained a development agency. To have a development agency doing conservation was very interesting because there were so many people at USAID who had experience in development, and they thought about development in a very sophisticated way. Again, I’m not going to pretend that USAID has a perfect history or had a perfect present during its last year or two, but it had, there was a lot of institutional experience, know-how, about how to do development right, how to do development in a way that respected local cultures and would be lasting in its impacts. And so with conservation, when conservation became one of the missions of USAID, they were able to bring that development expertise to conservation. And I think that was a good influence on many very well-established conservation NGOs that were still struggling, and are still struggling in some ways, to learn that lesson.

Mike: Yeah. I think it’s a really important topic to discuss, and one that requires ongoing coverage, because it is a common theme I am noticing and have noticed in my career so far, is that poverty does underlie many conservation problems.

Michelle: Yeah. There is no, if you don’t know where your dinner is coming from, you are not going to be thinking long term.

Mike: Right.

Michelle: And you have to be able to think long term in order to think about conservation. That’s just by definition, that’s what conservation is. So it’s extremely fundamental. From what I have observed from covering conservation over many years, I don’t think conservation has to be a moneymaker in order for people to engage in it. That’s nice if it’s possible, but people are willing to sacrifice some things in order to conserve their ecosystems because people care about their ecosystems. They want them to thrive. They do have to have their basic needs met in order to engage in conservation meaningfully.

Mike: That’s a great point to bring up, Michelle, and I’ve noticed it as well, is that people are actually, if you ask them, not everyone, of course, but many people I speak with really are not that super interested in profits. They’re interested in basic needs being met and the ability to live a good life. And that doesn’t mean necessarily that a company needs to have returns on their profits every single quarter. So I think that’s, again, a theme we talk a lot about in this podcast, but it’s something that I think requires a lot of coverage.

Michelle: Yeah.

Mike: So now we get to how these organizations and communities are responding, such as the FKL, the SCNL, and the Endangered Wildlife Trust. How are these organizations responding? Feel free to give us some of the most salient examples you can think of.

Michelle: Sure. Just in the immediate term, the Society for the Conservation of Nature in Liberia, they secured short-term funding from the Rainforest Trust, that’s a US-based conservation group. They were able to restart their eco-guard patrols, which we spoke about earlier. Like I said, that’s short-term funding. So the long-term future of the eco-guard patrols remains very uncertain. And also the organization has had to cut other programs because of these USAID funding cuts. And there are a lot of things that they can’t, a lot of really basic things they can’t do. For instance, they can’t meet with people in other countries who are also part of the same forest ecosystem. They used to have these cross-border meetings to plan their strategies, and they’re no longer able to just talk face to face because they don’t have the money for travel. So things like that, really basic functions like that, have been lost. Other organizations have found ways to reallocate funds within their own budgets in order to, basically, they’ve triaged and they’ve moved money from long-term projects to short-term projects in order to continue them. And then other organizations have found alternative sources of money, either from European governments. Norway and Germany came up a lot in the conversations I had with people. A lot of people had either gotten money from those countries or other European countries, or were awaiting word on possible funding from those countries. But again, that is not something that can be counted on long term, in part because a lot of those countries are recognizing that, given the Trump administration’s hostility to NATO, they have to bulk up their own militaries. So funding that would have gone to international development or international conservation is now going to domestic military budgets. And then on the more hopeful side, several organizations said that they had gotten a real influx of funding just from their everyday, some from philanthropy, philanthropists and foundations, but also just from their everyday members. People heard about USAID, they heard about the cuts to conservation funding, and were concerned and have stepped up their donations.

Mike: That really spoke to me because we’re living in, I think it’s fair to say, a bit of a cost-of-living crisis, globally speaking. And so people are feeling the pinch, and for them to say, I am going to actually give more to these organizations, it’s inspiring. It’s not what you might expect to happen, I think.

Michelle: And I think people were, there was a fair amount of attention to USAID and its dismantlement when the Trump administration first attacked it. But it would be easy to assume that, given the amount of news, good and bad, mostly bad news, that people are taking in these days, it would be easy to assume that they had just forgotten and moved on to the next crisis. And it was glad to hear that the people who were committed to these organizations already were paying attention, continuing to pay attention, and had stepped up their donations.

Mike: Now you do highlight that, and you’ve painted a really good picture of the external funding that organizations are getting, but some of them, you show that local communities are actually sustaining themselves through things like ecotourism. Can you share those examples?

Michelle: Yeah. There are a few, I think this, I guess this could be twisted into an argument that sounds something like, if they’re doing so well, why do we need USAID in the first place? But that’s not the case. There are a few places and organizations where USAID has had the time to lay enough groundwork that these places and communities were able to build on that and move forward. For instance, in Ethiopia, there was a lot of work over decades to help Indigenous communities gain the legal right to their ancestral lands. Land tenure is something your listeners are probably familiar with, that is incredibly important around the world in order for communities to be able to advance conservation in the places they know best. And because that groundwork had been laid, now many of those communities are able to either continue or initiate ecotourism and hunting businesses in order to support conservation on their own lands.

Mike: So there was something that was created under the Biden administration. It was called the U.S. Foundation for International Conservation. And this was spared any cuts, I believe, based on what I read from your reporting. So that kind of sounds pretty hopeful. Can you detail what that is and what it’s contributing?

Michelle: Yes. I would call this a small but genuine bright spot. Good to know, and yes, those listening should check and make sure it’s still a bright spot, because I think it’s touch and go as we speak today. The U.S. Foundation for International Conservation still exists. It is set to contribute a dollar for every $2 raised by private donors. So it’s essentially a matching fund for philanthropic foundations interested in conservation. It had bipartisan support, which I think is really interesting and important to remember, especially in these incredibly polarized times. There is an organization called the International Conservation Caucus that encourages bipartisan discussions about conservation and the creation of common ground on conservation. And I think there’s still hope for that. As polarized as people are, they can agree that animals should not go extinct and that gorgeous places should not be transformed into wastelands. I think no matter your politics, there is a sliver of common ground there, literal and metaphorical. So that common ground is what helped establish the U.S. Foundation for International Conservation. As of now, it still exists, and I think that is a place where really important conservation initiatives can be assisted by U.S. funds.

Mike: You write about two former USAID staffers who are working on not just preserving institutional knowledge, but they are looking to identify the most impactful projects and try to connect them to help right now. So can you detail what these two staffers are doing, and what are the more promising aspects of their efforts?

Michelle: Yeah, and I’ll say that I thought this project was very practical, but also very moving because it is being executed by two people who were fired abruptly from their jobs, essentially ending their careers at USAID, or their careers as they knew them. Their names are Hadas Kushner and Monica Bansal, decades of experience between them. And they got together, they got some small grants, and last summer they started trying to collect and preserve the agency’s accumulated climate and conservation knowledge. So they’ve reestablished contact with, I think, about 600 former USAID employees, contractors, grantees across 65 countries. And then they’ve also done in-depth interviews with about 150 people who worked on USAID or USAID-supported conservation and climate programs in certain countries: Colombia, Peru, Kenya, Mozambique, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. So they really went in depth in those countries and got to understand what’s happened since USAID left. How have you been able to continue, what’s been lost? And out of that work, they’ve reestablished connections among people, but they’re also trying to identify, and this is the very practical part, identify formerly USAID-funded programs that they feel are still vital enough, still promising, there’s enough still going on where additional funding would help them continue. They’ve identified 94 of them and they’re trying to match funders, foundations, with these projects and really get them money to keep going. And that project is called Momentum for the Environment.

Mike: Amazing.

Michelle: Yeah. And I’ll mention one other initiative that’s not included in this story. It’s called Reimagining Conservation, and that is an effort by former USAID staffers and others to think beyond the Trump administration to a day, hopefully, when the U.S. will have a more, a revived role, a revived formal role in international conservation. And that is an ongoing conversation about conservation and what it should look like, learning from both the successes and mistakes of USAID. And I think that’s a very interesting and forward-thinking effort that hopefully will pay off in the future where the U.S. is more involved in these really crucial issues once again.

Mike: And speaking of learning from past experiences, we did have a former USAID staffer on the show just a couple weeks ago. Her name is Lindsay Moore, and she used a large language model to preserve all the data from the project evaluations over 60 years in what’s called the Development Experience Clearinghouse, or at least it was called that.

Michelle: Yes.

Mike: I wanted to know if you came across any people who knew about this in your reporting.

Michelle: I’ve written about it a little bit myself, and I think it’s a really exciting initiative. And I have talked to some staffers who are really happy to see those reports being put to use because apparently those reports were always generated, but nobody really had the time to look back on them and actually put them to use. And this project is, I think, a very responsible, thoughtful use of AI, and a way to, unlike so many others out there, it is a very constrained and targeted use of AI to understand a body of knowledge that no human could. It’s so big that no human could get through it all by themselves. So it’s a way of looking through that body of knowledge for patterns that might not be identifiable by a single person or team of people just because of the volume of information. So I think, in many ways, the shock is still wearing off for some USAID staffers. But I, and these initiatives like the one that Hadas and Monica are undertaking are really just getting underway. But I know that information like that is going to be available. It is going to be very useful in the future.

Mike: Michelle, is there anything else regarding the situation that we haven’t discussed that you really think is important for listeners to know?

Michelle: I would just say, we touched on this several times, but conservation is such a long-term undertaking and it requires a lot of experience. Every place, of course, is different, so it requires a lot of familiarity with a place over time, a lot of trial and error usually over time, and it is so frustrating to see one of the agencies that had that experience. It is so frustrating to see the agency demolished and to see that knowledge scattered, that accumulated knowledge scattered. And so I would just ask, or suggest to people, that it’s a long-term undertaking and the demise of U-S-A-I-D deserves your long-term attention, both your long-term attention on the health effects and your long-term attention on the conservation effects because they’re going to continue to ripple outward and they’re going to continue to deepen and become more obvious. And if you have a direct way to help, there are some direct ways to help that we talked about. If you have ways to spread the word about why something might be happening that you’re seeing, please do that. But this is a really tragic loss, both for people, habitats, and wildlife, and it’s going to take a long-term effort to rebuild.

Mike: Michelle Nijhuis, where would you like to direct people to read more of your work?

Michelle: Oh, you can read more of my work at my website, which is called rhymeswithnijhuis.com. I write for Biographic. I also write for High Country News, which covers conservation issues in the U.S. West. And I’ll just quickly re-up the two initiatives I mentioned, Momentum for the Environment, which you can find at oneearthpartners.com. That’s the effort to match unfunded projects with foundations and contributors. Then there’s Reimagining Conservation, and that’s reimaginingconservation.com.

Mike: Michelle Nijhuis, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It was a pleasure having you on the show.

Michelle: Thank you.

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