Red-cockaded Woodpecker — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It depends on old longleaf pine forests in the Southeast. Those forests once covered tens of millions of acres. Most are gone.

83% of freshwater fish have gone extinct since I was a young child. Their migratory journey's, like salmon, are collapsing. This is happening all over the world. A friend wrote this book. I bought a copy then he sent me a signed one. Good man, great scientist. www.goodreads.com/book/show/20...

Idaho Fish and Game commissioner charged with poaching a bull elk. Not the first time state leadership has had ties to poaching. At some point it stops being an anomaly and starts looking like alignment. Wildlife isn’t mismanaged. It’s managed as inventory. www.idahostatesman.c...

Florida Panther — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It survives in a shrinking corner of south Florida. The problem isn’t the panther. The problem is that millions of people also want to live there.

Desert Tortoise — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It lives in the Mojave Desert, where solar projects, transmission lines, and development are expanding rapidly. The future is green. The tortoise is not so sure.

Delta Smelt — another potential candidate for the God Squad. This small fish lives in California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. For years it’s been blamed for water shortages. The real problem is that we promised more water than the rivers can provide.

Northern Spotted Owl — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It became the symbol of the old-growth logging wars in the Pacific Northwest. But the owl didn’t stop logging. It revealed how little old forest remained.

Another article framing the basin’s water crisis as a policy failure, but the Colorado Compact worked. It delayed collapse for nearly four decades. The illusion was believing large amounts of water could be diverted without consequences. Ecology always settles the account.

The Greater Sage Grouse—another God Squad nominee. In the 1990s states formed working groups to keep it from declining to the point it needed listing. I hired a Nevada biologist in 2000 who had been on one. That was 25 years ago.

The Lesser Prairie Chicken—another potential God Squad nominee. When I worked at U.S. Fish & Wildlife it was a candidate species. Conservation agreements were supposed to protect it so listing wouldn’t be necessary. That was decades ago.

this is the podcast episode youtu.be/N8EPM4wgEes?...

I see effective modern conservation as War. The Greatest War in history. There will be No more Human History or Human or Human Rights, if WE YOU don’t treat #ClimateAction as a #War between Good & Evil Life vs Death & so far we are losing horribly. Time to #evolve

The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard—a potential God Squad nominee. It lives in the Permian Basin sand dunes — one of the most productive oil regions on Earth. I worked on this species years ago at U.S. Fish & Wildlife. Conservation agreements were supposed to protect it. A few decades later, here we are.

What if modern conservation isn’t restoration—but CPR? open.substack.com/pub/lylel/p/...

Most people don’t know this, but the U.S. government has a committee that can decide when extinction is acceptable called the God Squad. It was created under the Endangered Species Act. It will meet March 31. Over the next few days I’ll introduce some species that have been “getting in the way.”

The debate over giant sequoias is framed as: manage the forest or let nature recover. But humans have already changed the conditions these trees evolved under. Once the operating system changes, it becomes a question of which choice slows the loss.

Plants pause, resume, and even accelerate growth depending on environmental stress. Millions of years of evolutionary problem-solving. 🌱 We call it physiology. But in another context we might call it intelligence.

The most effective censorship rarely looks like censorship. It looks like risk. When speaking up carries existential consequences, advocacy changes. Systems rarely collapse because people stop caring. They collapse because caring quietly becomes unsafe. apple.news/AFibeKOzc...

One of the largest industrial systems on Earth operates almost entirely outside environmental accounting: the global military. War is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an ecological one.

Forests burn. Rivers are contaminated. Wildlife disappears. Soils are scarred by craters and heavy metals. Entire ecosystems are pushed into states from which they may not recover. Yet the environmental dimension of war is rarely discussed.

War is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an ecological one. open.substack.com/pub/lylel/p/...

War is usually measured in lives lost and cities destroyed. Rarely in forests burned, soils contaminated, rivers poisoned, and wildlife displaced. But the biosphere pays a price for every conflict.

In 1981 the federal grazing fee was $2.31. In 2026 it was raised… to $1.69. During that same time: • U.S. home prices rose ~6× • Gas prices nearly tripled • Household income more than tripled A subsidy hiding in plain sight.

Appeared on the Green Root Podcast to talk about forests, conservation, and how environmental decisions play out inside agencies. My perspective comes from years working in endangered species conservation and land management. Full conversation here:

Whitefish declining across Idaho rivers. Official message: “They’re still abundant. Go harvest some.” Humans have a remarkable ability to interpret recovery pulses as surplus and surplus as opportunity. It’s one of the quiet engines of ecological collapse.

Healthy ecosystems function without financial engineering. The moment they are turned into “investable assets,” their survival becomes dependent on profitability. Nature doesn’t need tokenization. It needs restraint. www.wri.org/insights/nat...

A tiny, genetically isolated herd of elephants survives in a remote forest, witnesses to a world that once stretched across Africa. The mammoths on Wrangell Island survived thousands of years after mainland mammoths disappeared. These elephants may only have decades.

Just after Sunrise… I use camouflage & night-vision to penetrate logging areas due to armed security who shoot at me. I realize that’s hard to understand #deforestationpatrol because we don’t wave #protest signs It’s the #frontlines of #globalwarming A #war for #survival Not a Social Cause

The interstate highway system is an engineering triumph. It is also one of the largest habitat fragmentation projects ever undertaken on Earth. Freedom of movement for us came at the cost of movement for everything else.

Compost can trigger a local microbial pulse. But pulses aren’t ecosystems, and compost doesn’t scale. Soil communities develop over decades through plants, roots, fungi, animals, and hydrology. A quick microbial bloom in a garden bed isn’t the same as restoring landscapes.

Ancient forests are not simply collections of trees. They are centuries, sometimes millennia, of accumulated soils, fungi, nutrients, and relationships. We can plant trees quickly. Rebuilding ecological time is another matter entirely.

“ On the Green Root Podcast, Lyle Lewis, writer & former Endangered Species Branch Chief with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, speaks up for genuine ecological conservation while revealing the best ways for advocates to pressure government land management agencies” youtu.be/N8EPM4wgEes?...

NASA has demonstrated the ability to deflect an asteroid threatening Earth. Unfortunately, the asteroid that has been degrading the planet’s ecosystems for the last few centuries remains unidentified.

The following announcement was issued today by the Department of Planetary Optimization. open.substack.com/pub/lylel/p/...

Two new mammal species discovered in New Guinea rainforests. Exciting and sobering news. How many species disappeared in the last century before anyone even knew they existed? Discovery reminds us how incomplete our knowledge of biodiversity still is.

Models didn’t underestimate sea-level rise just because of “poor modelling.” Feedback loops, ocean dynamics, land subsidence, and heat storage interact in ways we don’t fully understand until they appear in data.

The Southwest isn’t just drying. It’s holding less water. Grazing, aquifer depletion, river control, agriculture…..centuries of hydrologic modification. Now add warming. Drought is temporary. Aridification rewrites the system.

The Sky Islands still show green arteries from above. Much of the wildlife connectivity is already severed. Conservation, at this stage, means keeping the remaining threads open for as long as possible.

This headline would have been accurate at almost any point in the last few centuries. Bird decline didn’t begin with modern monitoring. It began with habitat destruction and commercial exploitation. What’s new isn’t the loss. It’s that we can finally measure it.

Across Republican and Democratic administrations alike, federal courts have often done more to enforce ESA protections than the agencies responsible for them. Conservation by litigation is a symptom of structural failure.

Alfalfa... is a low-value water-guzzling crop. So why does this rampant water usage persist?...legislative measures dating back to the 1860s essentially allow for a first-come, first-served approach to water rights. Established dairy farmers and ranchers have free rein to use vast amounts of water.

Livestock doesn’t just consume water through feed crops. It also alters dryland watersheds, reducing infiltration, increasing runoff, and weakening the system’s ability to store snowmelt. You can’t stabilize a river while destabilizing the land that feeds it.

AI supremacy. Diesel generators. Clean Air Act exemptions. The future is here….and it still smells like combustion. Turns out “innovation” mostly means finding faster ways to ignore limits.

Wildlife policy has entered a strange phase where killing is marketed as education, profit is framed as stewardship, and eradication is sold as management. Wolves are a complex part of functioning ecosystems being turned into a revenue stream. This isn’t conservation. It’s commodification.

Another example of human activity expanding faster than our ability to understand its consequences.

✅ Facts!👇🏼 “Staff learn which analyses will trigger scrutiny. Scientists learn which conclusions will be labeled “advocacy.” Managers learn what will complicate budgets or invite oversight. Over time, boundaries move inward…No one says “don’t go there.” People simply stop going there.”

Last week: what forests reveal. This week: what institutions quietly train us not to see. open.substack.com/pub/lylel/p/...

The most powerful constraints are the ones no one has to say out loud. New essay tomorrow.

Attempting to restore 1960s logging levels assumes the forests of the 1960s still exist. Following that logic, we might also consider converting the Pacific Northwest to tundra to support CRISPRed woolly mammoths. Ecology doesn’t run on nostalgia.