Working in the climate and environmental agendas is a daily commitment to renew hope and act for change, even when the ground keeps shifting beneath us. As we witness the dismantling of regulations that are meant to protect people and ecosystems from the growing threats of the climate crisis, we are also seeing daily actions by the federal government that are undermining our democratic institutions and constitutional protections. In this atmosphere, our mission to prepare communities to become resilient to climate-related threats is more needed than ever.
The latest blow came when President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) repealed the scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions can endanger “public health and welfare.” This 2009 federal rule is the legal foundation for virtually all major climate regulations. Despite the overwhelming global scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change, the current administration is sending a clear message that it is stepping away from federal climate protections.
However, no amount of denial will prevent worsening wildfires, flooding communities, sweltering heat, and profound social and ecological disruption. In California and across the US, we are experiencing more devastating disasters every year, with mounting costs and lasting trauma for our communities and ecosystems. The cost of inaction is much higher than acting decisively and urgently now.
While this announcement may not be entirely surprising, it is deeply alarming and will have profound consequences for our lives. As the federal government continues to pursue the path of denial, state, regional, and local entities—all of us—must step up in our commitment to climate action and ensure our democratic frameworks and processes can withstand these attacks.
Moments like this can spark outrage, but they must also accelerate our willingness to fight back!
Advocacy and policy work don’t happen in a vacuum; they live in relationships. Over the years, Greenbelt Alliance has built lasting connections with communities throughout the region, including the people most affected by climate-related hazards, the lack of affordable housing, the neighborhoods and residents who face the greatest risks from unchecked development, environmental degradation, and the steady erasure of open space.
We have worked in coalition with organizations representing farmworkers, communities of color, low-income renters, and others whose voices have too often been excluded from the table where land use decisions are made. These partnerships are not peripheral to our mission. And all of our voices are critical to shape our future. The strong civic fabric that our work knits together helps build not just a physical resilience to a changing climate but also the social resilience we need to fight back against injustice
We have learned that policy victories are fragile without the community roots to defend them. Laws get enforced when people are organized enough to demand it. Protections hold when those they protect have both a seat at the table and the relationships to sustain pressure over time. And when democratic institutions themselves come under threat—as we are witnessing today, in attacks on immigrant communities, on federal agencies, on the independence of the courts—it is those same community bonds that allow people to resist, to shelter one another, and to keep going.
We see this in communities across the country living under the shadow of federal overreach and immigration enforcement that has sown fear and fractured civic trust. When people are afraid to show up, to speak out, or to engage with public processes, democracy doesn’t just weaken—it can be eliminated, along with the accountability for actions that harm people and nature.
Greenbelt Alliance stands with all communities whose ability to participate freely in civic life is under threat, because their freedom to engage is bound up inseparably with our own.
