A Verdant Republic

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher

Environmental stewardship is, at bottom, a question about obligations across time. Debts to future Americans do not appear on a ballot, which is exactly why a republic must think about them deliberately.

Jill Lepore's history reminds us that government grew to meet environmental problems the market did not solve; her We the People also recounts efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to write environmental rights into the Constitution. A few states have gone further, with Pennsylvania and Montana guaranteeing a right to a clean environment in their own constitutions. Michael Lewis argues that the competence of agencies, whether forecasters, scientists or fire experts, is infrastructure. His new book Blockers includes a federal scientist who figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Eddie Glaude Jr.'s reckoning with national myths extends to who bears environmental burdens, the core question of environmental justice.

Here the evidence itself is contested terrain. In May 2025, NOAA announced that its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database would stop updating after 2024 data, citing changing priorities, statutory mandates and staffing. The database counted 403 disasters from 1980 to 2024 that each caused more than $1 billion in damage, totaling more than $2.9 trillion in inflation-adjusted losses, including a record 28 events in 2023. The nonprofit Climate Central has since revived the series with the scientist who ran it at NOAA, and reports 23 such disasters costing $115 billion in 2025. Defenders of the report saw an assault on climate science; while the critics defend the current administration’s ability to shift priorities and budgets. The database tracks costs and does not attribute events to climate change, so the claim is narrower: disaster costs are a measurable public concern, and the quality of federal data shapes policy.

The same question applies to other sources. Further evidence should come from EPA monitoring data, NOAA climate records and Census demographic data. EPA removed its EJScreen mapping tool, which showed unequal exposure to pollution and flood risk, from public access in February 2025. Volunteer coalitions have posted a reconstruction, and a lawsuit challenging the removal was dismissed on standing grounds in March 2026.

Four policy areas stand out: Clean energy can lower emissions and long-run energy costs. Grid resilience matters for reliability under heat, storms and rising demand. Water infrastructure, from lead pipes to aging systems to drought and flood management, is a perennial under-investment. Wildland conservation preserves landscapes and ecosystems, but are usually in tension with property rights and local economies.

The hard questions are practical. Who pays, and how are costs split between ratepayers and taxpayers? Can reliability be guaranteed during a transition? How are property owners compensated when land use changes? Can agencies deliver projects on time and at cost? Skeptics question affordability and dependability, while advocates stress the rising cost of delay. Both are asking about implementation.

The closing question is moral as much as technical: what do present generations owe to future Americans, and what institutions can credibly carry that obligation beyond one election cycle? In the end the question is: who do you love and what kind of world do you want for them?

Sources:

Jill Lepore, These Truths (W.W. Norton, 2018) and We the People (Liveright,2025).
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again (Crown, 2020) and America: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (Crown, 2026).
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road (Penguin, 2019).
Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War (Oxford, 2020).
Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (W.W. Norton, 2018) and Blockers (W.W. Norton, 2026).
Ray Madoff, The Second Estate (University of Chicago Press, 2025).