Over the last few decades, wildfires, farmers, and cattle ranchers have razed millions of acres of tropical forests across the planet. Much of that deforestation has occurred in three countries: Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia.

But in the last few years, another, smaller nation has risen in the ranks of nations with the most severe forest loss — Bolivia. 

Situated just west of Brazil, Bolivia lost 1.5 million acres of primary forest in 2025 alone, more than any other country aside from Brazil, according to a new analysis by the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute (WRI), a research group. That’s just shy of the surface area of Delaware. 

Those lost acres in Bolivia are part of threatened and globally important ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and the Chiquitano dry forests. They are rich not only in wildlife — including the elusive maned wolf, a long-legged canine that is actually not a wolf — but also in carbon. After trees are cleared, much of the carbon they store returns quickly to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. (Not-so-fun fact: Yearly carbon emissions from deforestation in the tropics are greater than the output from the entire European Union.)

On the surface, the story of deforestation in Bolivia mirrors that of other tropical countries: People are knocking down trees there to make way for cattle ranches and farms, the two leading drivers of tropical forest loss. Often, people clear land with fire. And as climate change makes droughts more severe in places like Bolivia, those fires more easily spread out of control and into areas that weren’t meant to burn, taking out even larger stretches of primary forest. 

But when you look more closely at who, exactly, is fueling much of the recent deforestation, Bolivia starts to stand out — thanks to an unexpected player.

The white religious sect cutting down Bolivia’s trees

The main reason people clear forests in Bolivia is to make way for cattle. It’s typically cheaper to buy forested land and remove the trees than to acquire existing pasture, says Daniel Larrea, science and technology program director at Conservación Amazónica, a Bolivian NGO. Plus, under the country’s legal system, landowners risk losing their land in Bolivia if they don’t demonstrate that they’re using it “productively,” such as by raising cattle for beef, effectively creating an incentive for deforestation. 

The other major source of forest loss in Bolivia is the rapid expansion of soy farms, the nation’s top export crop, by weight. Between 2001 and 2021, soy farms in Bolivia — which feed global demand for animal feed and soybean oil — destroyed some 2.2 million acres of forests, according to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Amazon Conservation Association (affiliated with Conservación Amazónica). That’s roughly the size of Puerto Rico. 

Soy farming is among the leading causes of deforestation across the tropics, in places like Brazil, Argentina, and parts of Africa. What makes it more unusual in Bolivia is the people behind much of its production and related environmental harm: Mennonites. 

A mostly white Christian group, Mennonites — who have similar origins to the Amish — started migrating to Latin America from Canada in the early 1900s. They first settled in Mexico and Paraguay and then later expanded into a number of other South American countries, including Peru and Bolivia, in the mid-20th century. Bolivia is now home to the largest and fastest-growing community of Mennonites in Latin America, says Yann le Polain de Waroux, a geographer at McGill University, who has studied Mennonites. 

As they spread across Latin America, Mennonites typically made a living by farming, which they’ve done for centuries. And in Bolivia, one of the main crops they grew — and still grow — is soy. In fact, Mennonites were among the first groups to introduce commercial soy farming to Bolivia, helping turn the country into a top-10 soy producer globally, according to Susanna Hecht, a researcher at the University of California Los Angeles. While Mennonite colonies often eschew modern household technologies, like smartphones and TVs, their farms typically use the same machinery as any modern farm, including large tractors and herbicide-tolerant seeds, Hecht told Vox.

In the last few decades, Mennonites have produced between about 20 percent and 40 percent of Bolivia’s soy, according to different studies and reports. And much of that production came at the expense of Bolivia’s tropical and dry forests, which stood in the places where fields of soy now grow. Researchers estimate that Mennonites caused nearly a quarter of the soy-related deforestation in Bolivia over the last two decades — and that share has risen in more recent years, according to Amazon Conservation Association’s Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program.

To be clear, it’s not that Mennonites operate their farms in an especially destructive way; you can’t farm soy in forest habitats without first clearing trees. Blame for surging deforestation more fairly lies on the government — which has, over the years, made expanding agricultural production a state policy and allowed people to clear forests without penalty. Mennonites have, for example, “been able to capitalize on government incentives through the duty-free import of heavy machinery for mechanized agriculture,” Larrea said. 

Food companies and consumers also play a large role in driving this deforestation: Demand for soybeans has skyrocketed in the last few decades, in step with a rise in the demand for meat and the soy-based livestock feed — yet another reminder that meat production destroys tropical forests. 

One 2023 report by the advocacy group Global Witness linked Cargill — the largest private company in the US, which sells animal feed, beef, and a wide range of other food and pharmaceutical products — to soy grown by Mennonites on land that was recently deforested. (Cargill told Vox that it did not find evidence that the soy it sourced from Bolivia, referenced in the Global Witness report, came from areas that were recently deforested.)

Is there an alternative path for Bolivia? 

Slowing deforestation globally remains one of the most challenging and complex environmental problems of our time. In each year of the last two decades, millions of acres of tropical forest — among the world’s most important regions for biodiversity and carbon sequestration — have vanished. Though global deforestation dipped in 2025, it still consumed 10.6 million acres, according to WRI’s analysis, equivalent to more than 11 soccer fields per minute. 

If there’s one way to distill the problem, it’s that forests today are not as valuable standing as they are cut down. Absent strong markets for carbon and biodiversity — which can make intact trees more valuable — well-enforced government regulations are among the only measures that work to cut deforestation rates. 

And that brings us to a rare bit of good news: Last year, Brazil — which contains about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest — saw a 42 percent drop in forest loss compared to 2024, according to WRI’s recent analysis. That drop is part of a larger trend over the past few years of declining deforestation in Brazil, the analysis shows. 

WRI researchers attribute Brazil’s success to stronger environmental policies and enforcement that were put in place by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”). Lula stepped into power in 2023, following the rule of Jair Bolsonaro, who showed wanton disregard for environmental laws and oversaw a spike in deforestation during his tenure. Lula, for example, relaunched a comprehensive anti-deforestation framework — known as the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon — that includes establishing new parks and bulking up environmental enforcement, among other measures. 

WRI similarly links a recent deforestation slump in a few other countries, including Colombia and Malaysia, to stronger environmental policies. Early last year, for example, the government of Colombia put in place a regulation that grants rural communities the rights to use forests on the condition that they keep them standing. 

These positive outcomes for forests hold important lessons for curbing deforestation in Bolivia. They show that attaining such a goal is possible. And that good governance works. “A shift in the country’s development vision is necessary,” Larrea said of Bolivia —  “a vision based on the sustainable use of the forest, not its destruction.”

In a paper published early last year, a group of mostly academic researchers made a number of recommendations for Bolivia’s new center-right government that was elected last year. They urged the new administration of Rodrigo Paz to make a number of changes, including strengthening environmental agencies, halting permits for farming and ranching in critical ecosystems, and helping Indigenous communities secure ownership over their lands. 

“By placing nature at the heart of its agenda, Bolivia can stem the loss of species and habitats, honour its international commitments, and forge a legacy of social–ecological resilience,” the authors wrote. “The world will be watching whether Bolivia chooses to continue down a path of extractive depletion or to lead a just and sustainable transformation worthy of its extraordinary biological and cultural wealth.”

Here’s a weird fact: Every time someone buys an assault weapon in the US, such as an AR-15, they’re funding wildlife conservation. The same is true if they purchase a handgun, a shotgun, or any other kind of gun or ammunition.

That’s thanks to a law most people have never heard of: the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, commonly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act. Passed by Congress in 1937, the law channels revenue from a tax on firearms, ammo, and archery equipment to state wildlife agencies — government organizations that restore wildlife habitat, monitor threatened species, and oversee hunting and fishing. Levied on firearm manufacturers and importers, the tax is 11 percent for long guns and ammunition and 10 percent for handguns, and it sits on top of other common taxes. 

Over the last decade, the law has channeled close to $1 billion a year into state wildlife agencies across the country, amounting to a substantial share of their budgets. One recent analysis found that Pittman-Robertson made up about 18 percent of state agency budgets, on average, in 2019. (License fees for fishing and hunting, along with a hodgepodge of other revenue streams, including a similar tax on fishing gear, make up the rest.) And revenue from Pittman-Robertson has been increasing, roughly doubling in the past two decades — in no small part because gun sales have surged. 

Despite the dedicated tax revenue, wildlife agencies are still chronically underfunded. They oversee the bulk of the nation’s imperiled species — which now comprise more than one-third of all plants and animals in the US — and threats to biodiversity like climate change are only getting worse. These agencies need all the money they can get.

As a result, “wildlife agencies have a clear incentive to increase firearm use if they want to sustain themselves,” said John Casellas Connors, a researcher at Texas A&M University and one of the leading experts on the Pittman-Robertson Act. “There’s a desire to increase access to opportunities to shoot, to ensure that people keep buying guns and using guns.” Indeed, the purchase of firearms of any kind helps pay for staff, wildlife monitoring, and many of the other conservation tasks they do. 

This raises an important question: Is it okay to fund conservation with tools of violence? 

Fewer hunters, more guns 

The link between conservation and guns is as old as the modern conservation movement itself. For a long time hunters were the movement.

In the late 1800s, elite and influential sportsmen like Theodore Roosevelt raised concerns about vanishing wildlife — deer, elk, bison, waterfowl, and other game species they liked to hunt. Ironically, rampant, unregulated hunting for profit is what threatened these animals in the first place. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, market hunting drove now-abundant white-tailed deer populations close to extinction, and similarly eliminated all but a few hundred bison. 

As much as Roosevelt and his peers recognized hunting as a problem for wildlife, however, they also saw sportsmen as conservation champions.

“In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen,” Roosevelt said. “The genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”

That sentiment gave rise to the conservation movement that we know today — and to state wildlife agencies, most of which first appeared in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Staffed with biologists and ecologists, these government divisions sought to preserve habitat and regulate fishing and hunting, a remit still reflected in many of their names (Arizona Game and Fish, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Pennsylvania Game Commission, and so on).

But they needed money. 

That’s where Pittman-Robertson came in. The idea behind the law — named for its two Congressional sponsors, hunters Key Pittman and Absalom Willis Robertson — redirected an existing excise tax on certain firearms (and later, through amendments, all firearms) to state wildlife agencies. The law also prohibited states from redirecting revenue from selling hunting licenses away from those agencies. 

The law put into practice what’s known as a “user-pay” model of conservation, the idea being that hunters rely on wildlife, so they should pay to preserve it — in this case through revenue from their hunting licenses and weapons. It also fueled the now-pervasive idea, perpetuated by hunters, that they pay for conservation. 

That was largely true for a time, but over the last few decades the number of hunters in the US has slowly declined — from more than 14 million hunters who are 16 years and older in 1991 to fewer than 11.5 million in 2016. The share of people in that age range who hunt has fallen even more, from 7.4 percent to 4.5 percent over that same period.

This trend has been worrying for wildlife agencies precisely because they have relied so much on hunters for funding.

But here’s the thing: While hunters have declined, gun sales in the US have increased — dramatically so. Estimates from the Trace, a newsroom that reports on gun violence, indicates that gun sales have roughly doubled since 2000. That means people are buying more guns but for purposes unrelated to hunting, such as handguns and AR-style weapons for self defense or for use at shooting ranges. Indeed, more than 70 percent of firearm and ammo sales these days are intended for purposes other than hunting, according to a 2021 report from the market research firm Southwick Associates. 

This has funneled more money overall to state wildlife agencies — just not from hunters. “The money that is going toward this largely is being borne by people who may never, ever step into the field, may never go into a duck blind, may never go out to a hunting stand,” said Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for the firearms industry. And that, in turn, has prompted wildlife agencies to cater to this growing population of firearm users.

Why wildlife agencies are funding shooting ranges

State wildlife agencies generally have two main goals: to manage hunting and fishing programs and to conserve native species and their habitats. That often entails things like removing invasive species, reintroducing animals back into the environment, and studying the spread of zoonotic diseases. Bringing wolves back to Colorado, for example, was a project led by the state’s wildlife agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 

But because of Pittman-Robertson and the ever-present crunch for funding, these organizations have become incentivized to encourage more gun and ammo purchases. Along with a handful of more recent amendments to the law — which make it easier to spend Pittman-Robertson funds on shooting activities — that incentive has led wildlife agencies to increasingly fund or build their own public shooting and archery ranges. Pittman-Robertson funding has supported more than 120 new ranges since 2019. 

By promoting firearm use (and related ammo purchases), target ranges do indirectly support wildlife conservation. But they are of course not wildlife conservation, said Christopher Rea, a sociologist at Brown University, who’s studied Pittman-Robertson. This is an important point, considering the speed at which ecosystems and animal species are declining across the US — and considering that agencies are supposed to use their resources to stem such losses. 

“Pittman-Robertson has drifted from preserving the biotic community and moved instead towards preserving firearms use,” Rea and Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, wrote in a 2022 paper. 

Some environmental groups have argued that, by using their limited resources to support sport shooting, wildlife agencies are pulling back on their responsibility to safeguard native species. “During a global extinction crisis requiring an all-hands-on-deck effort to conserve and protect declining species, state agencies are instead abusing the nation’s largest pot of restoration funding to promote recreational gun use and other ‘shooting sports,’” the advocacy group Wildlife for All said in a post on its website. 

Wildlife for All estimates that about a quarter of Pittman-Robertson funding for state agencies goes towards shooting and archery ranges, hunter education, and promoting shooting sports. But still, the group found, most of that money is spent on wildlife restoration and projects to safeguard animals and their habitats. And barring a resurgence in hunting, promoting other uses of firearms is a way for wildlife agencies to maintain as much funding as possible for increasingly essential conservation projects. 

There is, however, a deeper concern about funding conservation with firearms, though it has more to do with the human animal. Casellas Connors, Rea, and many other researchers point out that guns and gun ownership rates are linked to a higher risk of homicides and suicide. That means conservation is also tied to violence and harm. 

“As a matter of my own personal politics and moral preferences, I don’t think we should be funding conservation by selling [what are] essentially tools of violence,” Rea, of Brown, told me. “That’s really problematic.”

Oliva, with the firearms trade group, strongly disagrees with the idea that more firearms means more violence. National crime rates have fallen substantially, he said, relative to the late 1900s. The number of gun deaths has declined in the last few years, too, even though there are more guns in the US than ever. (One major caveat here is that gun deaths are still well above pre-pandemic levels, and suicide-related gun deaths have continued to increase.)

Gun laws are, of course, among the most contentious topics in US politics, and it’s unlikely that questions about funding wildlife agencies will change opinions on either side. But even if you think promoting or benefiting from the purchase of guns is morally wrong, it’s hard to argue that — under the existing budgetary circumstances — losing nearly a fifth of funding wouldn’t decimate wildlife agencies’ work. There’s no getting around the fact that any laws that have the effect of meaningfully reducing firearms sales would also likely eat into critical funding for conservation.

Gun sales are essential for wildlife, at least for now

Proposals to repeal Pittman-Robertson have been floated before, most recently in 2022. That would be a disaster for wildlife, said Mark Duda, executive director of the outdoor market research firm Responsive Management and a former state biologist in Florida. Money made available by the law has helped bring back all kinds of once-rare species across the country, he said, from elk and turkeys to peregrine falcons and bald eagles. In Montana, for example, the state agency — Fish, Wildlife, and Parks — used funding from Pittman-Robertson to study and later bring back bighorn sheep. 

Other people I spoke to agreed. “Wildlife agencies probably wouldn’t have been able to do almost any of the work they’ve done without Pittman-Robertson funds,” said Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, who’s currently working on a book about the law. Even with that funding, they often don’t have enough staff or resources they need to adequately monitor and restore declining wildlife populations, he said. 

Jonah Evans, who oversees non-game and rare species at Texas Parks and Wildlife, the state’s wildlife agency, said that money from gun taxes funds staff salaries and research on a range of imperiled native species, such as the tricolored bat and the loggerhead shrike, a songbird. “Pittman Robertson is like the backbone of wildlife management at our agency,” Evans said. In Texas alone, there are more than 1,000 animal species in decline that need help. Trying to conserve them all with the limited resources that Parks and Wildlife has, Evans said, “is an overwhelming project.” 

Disentangling the firearm industry from conservation could also have other, less obvious consequences. Beyond funding state agencies, Pittman-Robertson has also helped build a diverse political coalition of support for conservation, Rea says. The firearm industry — which tends to be much more conservative than the broader environmental movement — strongly supports Pittman-Robertson, in part because it helps sustain the animals that hunters want to shoot. And, by extension, the law gives the industry’s right-oriented constituency a stake in conservation. Even sport shooters and gun owners who don’t hunt support the excise tax, Duda told me, citing survey data.

“At a time when environmentalism is evermore polarized and left-coded, Pittman-Robertson helps continually reinject pro-conservation rhetoric into a right-leaning political sphere, via its links to hunting and guns,” Rea told me. “I strongly believe it’s one mechanism that helps maintain that long history of bipartisan support for conservation.” 

The moral debate aside, most people agree that wildlife agencies need more money than they have now, even with Pittman-Robertson in place. And, over the years, lawmakers have proposed additional sources.

In 2022, the US House passed a non-partisan bill called Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would send $1.3 billion a year to agencies specifically to help them safeguard vulnerable species. But the bill never passed the Senate, because lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to pay for it. (For scale, the war against Iran has so far cost the US about $25 billion.)

Another idea that’s circulated for decades now is to place an excise tax on outdoor gear like backpacks and hiking boots that would, like Pittman-Robertson, go towards state agencies. The logic of a so-called backpack tax follows a similar “user-pay” model: Hikers, rock climbers, and birdwatchers are also using the outdoors, so they should pay in some way to protect it. And while hunting is declining, these outdoor activities are booming. 

Nonetheless, the outdoor gear industry has successfully fought against putting such a law into practice, Rea said. “That’s really disappointing,” he told Vox. “That’s a way we could solve this problem.” 

I asked the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, about this. Kent Ebersole, OIA’s president, told me that the group opposes a backpack tax, because it would make gear more expensive and, thus, make outdoor recreation less accessible. “You’re harming people by increasing the price of an already expensive product,” he said, adding that outdoor companies are already facing steep costs of production from tariffs. ‘We do care about conservation,” Ebersole said. There are other ways to fund conservation besides burdening the industry with another tax, he said. (Ebersole highlighted a law in Georgia that directs a large portion of existing sales tax on outdoor gear to state wildlife conservation.)

Wildlife conservation is one of the rare causes that people seem to value across the political spectrum. “I’ve done 1,200 studies on how people relate to wildlife, and that is the common denominator,” Duda said. “People care deeply.” And yet, somehow, it’s hard to get anyone but the gun industry to pay for it.

The value of forest ecosystems is hard to overstate. Blanketing roughly a third of the US, they supply clean water and air, absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide, and provide homes for imperiled wildlife and a tranquil place for Americans to hunt and fish.

It’s for this reason that environmental advocates widely opposed a plan announced by the Trump administration last spring. In an early March executive action, he ordered his administration to ramp up logging in our public forests, including those managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Failing to “fully exploit” forests for timber, Trump said, weakens our economic security, degrades fish and wildlife habitat, and sets the stage for wildfire disasters.

A month later, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who also oversees the US Forest Service (USFS), declared an unexpected emergency across more than half of the agency’s forests, citing the risk of wildfire, disease, and other threats. The emergency declaration allows USFS to log those lands with far fewer restrictions. 

These moves drew unsurprising reactions from environmental groups.

“The Trump administration is brazenly sacrificing our forests and the species that depend on them,” Robert Dewey, former VP of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit conservation group, said last spring after the Trump announcement. “There is no legitimate reason or emergency to justify rubberstamping logging projects.”

Defenders of Wildlife and other organizations called the emergency declaration a gift to the timber industry.

It is indeed hard to see a good intention for our nation’s forests through Trump’s track record. At face value, his administration’s logging push seems like multiple environmental disasters waiting to happen.

Yet there are two important points these concerns tend to overlook, starting out with this: Logging isn’t always the environmental boogeyman it’s made out to be.  

Logging is often less harmful than you think

Logging is one of those things that seems universally and irrefutably awful for the environment. It brings to mind nightmarish images of giant machinery flattening pristine forests filled with helpless critters, à la movies like FernGully and Avatar. And in some parts of the world — and historically in the US — those images are not far off the mark. 

But the reality today is more complicated.

The first thing to know is that many of our public forests are already not in a truly “natural” state. Decades of misguided fire suppression and a period of widespread logging in the wake of World War II produced forests today that are dense with trees of similar age, which makes them prone to intense wildfires and attacks from pests. 

While it may sound counterintuitive, selective logging or thinning — i.e., removing some but not all of the trees — can actually make these forests healthier. In thinned-out forests, trees face less competition for water and sunlight, boosting their tolerance to drought and beetles, and fires aren’t as destructive, according to Mark Ashton, a professor of silviculture and forest ecology at Yale University. No one in this country knows this better than Indigenous Americans. Tribes were practicing thinning thousands of years ago using controlled burns, which prevent the buildup of fuel.

Absent a history of industrial logging and fire suppression, forests can thin themselves out on their own; when one tree grows big, for example, its canopy can shade out and kill those around it.

This raises another important point: Logging, and sometimes even clear-cutting, can mimic natural disturbances that shape forest ecosystems. Many Western forests, such as those dominated by lodgepole pine, evolved with fires that wipe out large tracts of trees. The cones of some of those trees only release seeds during a fire. In the right ecosystem, clear-cutting — followed by burning — can mimic this process, while also producing usable timber.

“It’s gotten a bad rap, but, I mean, basically you’re emulating a natural process,” Todd Morgan, a forest industry researcher at the University of Montana, said of strategic clear-cuts.  

Of course, slashing trees in one area doesn’t mean a fire won’t just burn them in another. And as fossil fuels heat up the planet and rainfall patterns change, loads of forests are going up in smoke with or without logging. In the age of climate change, clear-cutting is only adding to the existing loss of wildlife habitat — amid an extinction crisis. 

Still, logging, when done thoughtfully, isn’t always an environmental disaster. This is to say nothing of the valuable product it also produces: timber. Wood is a renewable material, unlike some of the alternative construction materials, like plastic, most of which still comes from oil and gas. Turning trees into lumber also keeps the planet-warming carbon they store locked up for longer than if they were burned. 

The economic reality behind Trump’s timber push

Regardless of potential impacts of logging, Trump’s plan to expand timber production on public lands may run into challenges anyway. And the main reasons for that are not as much environmental as they are economic. 

A big one is the lack of logging infrastructure near public forests. After World War II — when home-building was booming — the US intensively logged its national forests, the bulk of which are in the American West. Toward the end of the century, however, environmental regulations and a conservation ethic took hold, shifting most logging onto private lands that have fewer environmental protections. 

That’s still the reality today: Around 90 percent of all timber currently comes from private forests, including tree plantations, which are concentrated in the southeastern US. As a result, there simply aren’t a lot of operational sawmills near public forests anymore, said Brent Sohngen, an environmental economist at Ohio State University. Many of those forests, meanwhile, are remote and hard to access. “There’s just not going to be an easy route for getting those logs out of the woods into a mill at a cheap price,” Sohngen said.

Yes, companies could always build new mills in anticipation of more logging, but such projects are expensive and only tenable if it’s clear that public lands will remain open to substantial exploitation for years to come. That’s in no way guaranteed, Sohngen said. Policies change from one administration to the next, not to mention from one month to the next in the Trump administration.

“I don’t think there’s enough certainty that [demand] will be there long-term that you will see an increase in infrastructure,” said Chris Wade, a research economist at RTI International, a research organization. 

Another obstacle is environmental regulation — laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act that pushed the industry into private lands in the first place. “Whenever someone proposes a timber harvest [in public lands], it’s going to get litigated,” Sohngen says. It’s for similar reasons that opening up Alaska wilderness and ocean to oil drilling has drawn few takers. 

But perhaps the largest impediment to logging public lands is due, in part, to knock-on effects from Trump administration actions themselves — and that is that there’s simply not much demand for timber right now.

One reason is that the US housing market is stagnant due to high interest rates, and that market is a key driver of lumber demand. (Those high rates are, in turn, linked to inflation, which is expected to increase more due to the Trump administration’s war on Iran and its upward pressure on oil prices.) Some countries like China are also importing fewer logs from the US, due in part to retaliatory tariffs, further chilling demand, Wade said. 

What’s also worth noting is that, should timber demand rise again, private forests can easily ramp up production, Sohngen said. Logging in federal lands, meanwhile, will likely have to be subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, there seems to be little economic incentive or payoff to actually cut more trees on public lands.

The very, very big caveat 

Even with these obstacles in place, public lands will likely see a bump in timber harvesting under Trump. Again, there’s a way to log that wood responsibly, but doing so requires smart, experienced people, extensive planning, and resources — things the Trump administration has been clear-cutting with impunity.

Last year, the US Forest Service lost at least 5,800 of its some 35,000 employees (as of late 2024). That includes more than 20 percent of its scientists with PhDs, according to an analysis by Science News. Late last month, meanwhile, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes at the agency — among them, moving its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Utah and closing 57 of its 77 research facilities. 

“Here’s my worry: Where are all the foresters in the forest service?” Ashton told me last fall, before the recent reorganization. “The whole institution has been gutted. That’s ominous. If you want to manage these forests sustainably, you have to have the knowledge and technical professionalism to do it right.” 

Trying to manage forests without staff and research facilities is like “trying to fly a plane without a pilot,” said Martin Dovciak, a forest ecologist at the State University of New York.

At the same time, the administration is also trying to rescind what’s known as the Roadless Rule, which protects vast stretches of wilderness and old-growth forests from logging — those that haven’t been logged in the recent past and often don’t need active management. “It would be really crazy to do timber harvesting there,” Sohngen said. “There would be places there that [logging] would be disastrous for the environment.” And it’s not clear that logging old-growth trees even makes economic sense, foresters told me. 

What’s more is that the Trump administration has been attempting to skirt safeguards that ensure logging on public lands minimizes environmental harm. The administration may once again, for example, convene the so-called God Squad — a panel with the power to overrule the federal Endangered Species Act — to sidestep protections for the nation’s most threatened species, should they interfere with logging plans (as it recently did to avoid protections for very endangered whales that happen to share territory with oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico). “I think it’s on the table,” Wade, of RTI International, said of calling on the God Squad to avoid protections for species in peril. 

In response to an email detailing our reporting, a spokesperson for the Forest Service reiterated that active forest management (which includes logging) helps reduce the growing threats of wildfire, insects, disease, and drought. The agency did not address claims that Trump administration policies, and the loss of expertise, would make it hard to manage forests sustainably and in a way that is economically feasible. 

A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, similarly told Vox that wildfires and other disturbances have razed vast amounts of forest in the West. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of the Interior is committed to providing opportunities for the timber industry to boost supply chain stability and support local economies, clear dead and dying timber, protect lives and property, and defend communities from the devastation of wildfire,” the spokesperson said.

The White House deferred to the Interior Department when asked for comment. 

This is all to say: While logging can be conducted to minimize harm and even benefit forest ecosystems, the Trump administration has shown no sign of making the environment a priority, experts told me. 

“I do not doubt that there are still going to be good people left in the agency who are going to try to do the best they can under the circumstances,” Dovciak said. “But the circumstances are getting worse. I really worry about that.”

In the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico lives one of the world’s rarest and most elusive marine mammals: Rice’s whale. There are just 51 of them left, according to the most recent scientific estimates, meaning they are quite literally on the knife’s edge of extinction.

That’s why, in 2019, the federal government — then under President Donald Trump’s first term — gave these sleek marine mammals a lifeline. It listed them as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, the most powerful wildlife protection law in the country and among the strongest in the world

The law makes killing or harming the animals illegal, with some exceptions. It also requires that federal agencies, including those that approve oil and gas leases, ensure that their actions won’t threaten the existence of species with ESA protection. This was key for Rice’s whale, as the main threat they face is from the Gulf’s oil and gas industry: vessel strikes, noise from exploration, and spills.

Protecting the whale under federal law gave it a chance for survival, environmental groups said when it was listed. But the new Trump administration has shown a formidable ability to water down, or sidestep entirely, protections for species under the law — especially if those animals live in areas with an active oil and gas industry.

That brings us to this week: On Tuesday, several top Trump officials convened a rarely assembled panel known as the God Squad — a committee, led by the Interior Secretary, that has the power to override the Endangered Species Act and approve activities that could potentially drive species to extinction. Congress created the committee in 1978, not long after the ESA was enacted, for rare cases when adhering to endangered species protections threaten the US economy or national security. It’s essentially a loophole in the Act, and it’s only been invoked a handful of times before. 

In Tuesday’s meeting, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — the highest ranking official present — said ESA protections for animals in the Gulf, such as Rice’s whales, threaten to limit oil production. The Gulf produces about 15 percent of the country’s crude oil, he said, which helps power the military and defend the US. “Exemption from the Endangered Species Act in the Gulf is not just a good idea, it is a critical matter of national security,” Hegseth told the panel.

The meeting lasted only around 15 minutes and the panel voted unanimously to exempt oil and gas activity in the Gulf from ESA protections. It was the first time the “God Squad” — formerly known as the Endangered Species Committee — has ever granted an exemption on the grounds of national security.

What Hegseth didn’t say is that ESA regulations for Rice’s whales and other species don’t forbid oil and gas drilling, they just require that companies take measures to avoid harming them, such as by minimizing shipping traffic in the whales’ core habitat. (There was also no discussion about the administration’s role in disrupting the flow of oil due to the war in Iran.)

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, meanwhile, pointed out that efforts to stop energy production in the Gulf — which, again, are not what the law does — displace fossil fuel production to countries that don’t produce energy as cleanly and safely as the US. Yet Burgum’s Interior Department has been sidelining clean energy projects in favor of dirtier fuels, such as oil and coal. The memory of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill is also still fresh. It spewed 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, creating a real national emergency. Not to mention: Rice’s whales declined by an estimated 22 percent after the disaster. 

“What happened today is a warrant for the extinction of endangered species in the Gulf, signed by political appointees on behalf of some of the wealthiest companies on Earth,” Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, said in a statement. “The ‘God Squad’ was designed for impossible, intractable conflicts where there was no other way forward. That is not what this is.”

Measuring about the length of a school bus, Rice’s whales — named after the late whale scientist, Dale W. Rice — are found only in the Gulf of Mexico and nowhere else. For an animal so large and charismatic, scientists don’t know much about them. In fact, researchers only recently identified Rice’s whales as a new species.

Ultimately, the God Squad exemption may get stuck in the courts — the Center for Biological Diversity, a litigious advocacy group, said in a statement, “we’ll overturn it.” In the meantime, these whales will continue to struggle to hold on to their very existence.

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When animals that aren’t native to an area harm the environment, we usually label them as invasive and consider them bad. State wildlife agencies spend tens of millions of dollars a year trying to eliminate them. 

That makes this fact peculiar: Those same agencies also regularly and purposefully release nonnative fish into the environment that, in many cases, damage local ecosystems. 

The reason for this apparent contradiction is that anglers everywhere want something nice to catch. Many US streams, ponds, and lakes no longer support healthy native fish populations, or never did. Without flooding them with brown trout, rainbow trout, largemouth bass, and a whole host of other nonnative species, there wouldn’t be much to fish.

A more complex explanation is money: The very revenue streams that fund state conservation come in part from selling fishing licenses. Stocking nonnative fish helps states sell more of them.

But along with those benefits, stocking local waters with nonnative species comes at an under-appreciated environmental cost, several scientists and wildlife advocates told me. The practice is ironic for publicly funded agencies charged with protecting native wildlife and biodiversity, they said.

The research on this is hard to parse. The worst, original impacts of releasing these animals occurred a long time ago in most places, and states — which also want to meet the needs of anglers — are far more careful when they stock streams and lakes today. What it clearly reveals, however, is a deeper problem facing conservation in the US, rooted, at least in part, in a funding model lodged in the past.

The strange history of fish stocking

Many of the most infamous invasive species in the United States arrived or spread accidentally, such as zebra mussels, spotted lanternflies, and Burmese pythons.

That has not been the case with fish.

In the late 1800s, as we built dams and polluted waterways, native fish began disappearing from streams and lakes across the country. So the federal government — and later state wildlife agencies — began raising fish in hatcheries and dumping them into waterbodies. 

Many of those fish were brought in from other states or even other countries; they were nonnative. In those days, some trains actually had “fish cars” that transported tanks of fry from coast to coast. To deliver them to mountain lakes, pack mules and horses would often carry them in milk cans or barrels. 

This wasn’t scandalous. At the time, there wasn’t much awareness around invasive species or that you might not want to unleash foreign animals into a landscape. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were notorious golden years of intentional (and later regretted) species introductions — that’s when European starlings were brought to New York City, for example, and cane toads were released in Australia. Plus, it was far easier to fill a stream with hardy nonnative fish than to fix the underlying environmental problems that endangered the local fishery in the first place. 

Fast-forward to today and, of course, we know a lot more about the impacts of invasive species, which are now considered one of the leading drivers of extinction. Stocking looks a lot different, too. Officials no longer use trains and mules to transport fish but specialized trucks, planes, and helicopters. 

What hasn’t changed is that states are still stocking streams and lakes with millions and millions of nonnative fish.

What happens when the fish are unleashed

The most obvious impacts of these fish stocking programs are in mountain lakes — many of which never had fish to begin with, until we brought in trout, said Angela Strecker, a freshwater ecologist at Western Washington University. 

“In lakes, we know that the consequences are quite dramatic,” Strecker said.

Introduced trout become apex predators in these ecosystems and gobble up native tadpoles, salamanders, and insects. Research shows that in the western US, trout released in alpine lakes has harmed numerous native amphibian species, including frogs and salamanders. And the consequences of these introductions don’t stop at the water’s edge, Strecker added. Birds and other land animals that eat insects can lose a crucial source of food in lakes where fish have been dropped in. As authors of a recent study put it, “predatory fish introductions fundamentally restructure alpine lake food webs.” 

In regions that do have native fish, such as streams, stocking with nonnative species can push out those local varieties, said Alex Alexiades, a fisheries biologist at Heritage University. “If you introduce a predator fish, it’s going to displace local fish,” he said. On the East Coast, for example, releasing brown trout and rainbow trout — which are native to other continents and the US West Coast, respectively — can push out the native brook trout, he said. Hatchery-raised fish tend to be more aggressive and better at fighting for limited resources, Alexiades told me. 

“The science is pretty clear,” said Helen Neville, a senior scientist at Trout Unlimited, a large nonprofit, founded by anglers, that works to conserve streams where native trout live. “There’s a limited amount of habitat and resources,” she said. “When fish have to compete for those resources and spend a lot of their time on aggression, or they are pushed into more marginal habitats because of the presence of another species, that is seen as generally pretty negative across the board.” 

Neville also pointed out the problem of hybridization — when nonnative fish breed with the local, native population. Their offspring are hybrid and have traits from both parents. And over time, that can eliminate the genetic lineage of fish that have evolved over millions of years to their local environment. “For some of these [native fish] species, hybridization is the path to extinction,” said Andrew Rypel, a freshwater ecologist at Auburn University. One of the biggest threats to a Texas fish called the Guadalupe bass, for example, is hybridization from stocked nonnative smallmouth bass, Rypel said. 

Other consequences are more complex. There’s some research, for example, that suggests that releasing nonnative fish has helped spread other invasive species — a phenomenon dubbed “invasion meltdown.” Nonnative sunfish that states have stocked in the Western US, for example, prey on dragonfly larvae that would otherwise eat the tadpoles of bullfrogs. Bullfrogs are invasive in that part of the country and eat their way through populations of native species, and stocked sunfish may be helping them spread. 

Some environmental activists have highlighted these consequences in an effort to restrict or put an end to nonnative stocking practices. Earlier this year, for example, a small nonprofit in Massachusetts launched a campaign to stop routine stocking of nonnative fish in the state. Massachusetts is spending public resources on a program that endangers local ecosystems for the benefit of only a small population (i.e., anglers), Brittany Ebeling, the group’s executive director, told Vox. (Those resources largely come from people who fish, whether or not they want to catch native fish.)

But even more mainstream environmental groups that count anglers as their members have expressed concerns about stocking nonnative fish. Fly Fishers International, a nonprofit that advocates for fly fishing, “acknowledges the recreational value many introduced populations provide to the angling public, but also emphasizes the damage caused to native fish communities by the introductions,” the group says. “FFI is concerned about the continued erosion of the genetic integrity of existing native fish populations.”

Trout Unlimited’s “default position is native populations,” said Mark Taylor, a spokesperson, who added that the group’s policy document on it, last updated in 1998, indicates Trout Unlimited opposes stocking nonnative trout or salmon in ecosystems with native trout species. TU also opposes putting trout in lakes that did not naturally contain fish, if the lakes have what it calls “natural diversity value,” per the document.

States have all kinds of environmental problems to contend with, from drought and other impacts of climate change to wildlife conflict with ranchers. Why, then, are they continuing to flood their waters with introduced fish, potentially fueling another one? 

What states told us

I reached out to wildlife agencies in all 50 states to ask about this, and more than half of them responded. Nearly every state I heard from stocks nonnative species for recreational fishing — mostly trout and bass — revealing how incredibly common this practice still is. 

Several states emphasized that the nonnative fish they stock are not, in fact, invasive species. That distinction is important. By most common definitions, a nonnative species becomes invasive if it does damage to humans or local ecosystems — but the line is often blurry. Honeybees are not native to the US and harm native bees, a highly threatened animal group, but we usually don’t consider them invasive species. Like stocked nonnative fish, honeybees are valuable to human industries and the damage they cause is largely invisible to the public. This is to say: Whether or not we consider animals invasive often comes down to what we value.

Another key point that states make is that, in many cases, the nonnative species they’re releasing have already been living in local streams and lakes for decades — they’re “naturalized,” as some states put it. In the 1960s, for example, Michigan stocked chinook salmon in Lake Michigan, partly as a way to control alewives, another invasive fish. Now most of the chinook, native to the Northwest and Alaska, are breeding on their own, said Ed Eisch, assistant chief of fisheries at the state’s wildlife agency. States commonly also stock imperiled native fish in an effort to help restore ecosystems.

In other cases, the waterbodies that states stock are humanmade, such as ponds, or have been dramatically altered by things like dams, pollution, or climate change. That means few native animals can survive in them anyway. In other words, the damage to the environment has already been done. What’s a bucket of foreign fish gonna do, especially if anglers will remove most of them anyway? 

“Connecticut’s watersheds and fish communities are irreversibly altered by hundreds of years of anthropogenic impacts,” the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, told me. The environment has changed so much, the agency said, that “it can no longer support fisheries for some native fishes, notably Atlantic Salmon.” 

North Dakota Game and Fish, meanwhile, told me that most of the state’s fishing areas didn’t even exist 75 years ago. “The damming of rivers and streams created large reservoirs that are foundational to the state’s recreational fishery,” said Greg Power, the fisheries division chief. Along with an increase in rain, he said, that’s multiplied the number of fishable waters from 23 in 1951 to 450 today. 

The problem with the “it’s already broken” thinking is that it doesn’t address the underlying environmental problems that drove native fish out in the first place — some of which are getting worse. Rising global temperatures, for example, are making it hard for certain native trout, which love cold water, to survive in their home ranges. 

If nothing else, it seems clear that in most cases stocking nonnative fish is not helping native wildlife populations recover. So while the decline of native aquatic life may be rooted in the past — in the so-called sins of our fathers — continuing to actively stock local waters may be contributing to a lower baseline level of biodiversity.   

Diversified streams

The other, deeper driver behind the widespread practice of stocking nonnative fish has more to do with how state wildlife agencies are funded. 

Recreational fishing is an enormous industry in the US, contributing some $230 billion to the economy each year, according to the American Sportfishing Association, an industry group. Because waters across the country are so degraded, stocking nonnative fish keeps this industry afloat. 

That’s obviously good for anglers — especially if they don’t care whether or not their catch is native. But it keeps state wildlife agencies afloat, too. This is key: On average, more than half of the revenue of these agencies comes from selling hunting and fishing licenses, along with federal funds that are distributed based partly on the number of licensed anglers in the state.

This funding model creates an “incentive for agencies to maximize fishing participation,” said Mandy Culbertson, a spokesperson for Wildlife for All, an environmental advocacy group. The more people who fish, the more revenue state wildlife agencies reel in. And this makes sense — activities like hunting and fishing that rely on the environment should support the agencies charged with conserving it.

But as Wildlife for All sees it, that incentive distorts the priorities of those public organizations. For too long, the group says, state wildlife agencies have prioritized maintaining game animals, such as nonnative fish that people catch, over conserving the full diversity of wildlife within their borders, much of which is now threatened. Culbertson also says that some of the money raised by fishing goes towards activities that “are not connected to conservation at all,” including increasing boating access and safety. 

In statements to Vox, some states acknowledged challenges with how funding for state conservation works. “Unfortunately, the funding model that we rely on to manage native and non-native fish alike is based on the recreation of sportsmen and women that direct their time and money in the pursuit of relatively few species of fish,” said Jason Henegar, the fisheries division chief at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. 

But Henegar and other state officials told me that this funding is also what allows their agencies to conserve native species, such as by restoring plants along a stream that help limit erosion and keep water cooler. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, for example, has a division dedicated to conserving non-game wildlife including rare, important, or sensitive fishes, Henegar said. “Tennessee anglers — many of whom fish for stocked non-native species — support this important biodiversity work through their purchase of the Agency’s licenses and permits,” he told me. 

Several states, including California and Utah, also repeatedly stressed that the way they stock nonnative fish today is nothing like it was in the past. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, for example, said it does stock some brown trout, which are native to parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but all of them are bred to be sterile, meaning they can’t reproduce after being released. “Many game species are also native species, so funding we get to support native sport fish is also used for conservation,” the agency told Vox.  

So, it’s complicated.

Under the existing funding structures, filling waterways with nonnative fish — some of which may or may not be invasive — helps conserve native species. But it also maintains, or possibly worsens, a broken ecosystem. 

The obvious solution, said Michelle Lute, the executive director of Wildlife for All, is for state wildlife agencies to diversify their sources of income. Those agencies have long seen hunters and anglers as their only customers, Lute said, but there are all kinds of different outdoor users, such as rock climbers and birdwatchers. Those other users almost certainly care more about a healthy environment than about stocked fish, she said; the challenge is in turning those values into revenue for states. 

Some states are making progress. In Oregon, for example, lawmakers recently voted to increase the state’s lodging tax and use the proceeds for wildlife conservation. Colorado, meanwhile, is raising money by selling special license plates to pay for efforts to minimize conflicts between ranchers and newly introduced wolves. Some lawmakers have also floated the idea of a “backpack tax” — taxing outdoor gear, like we do guns and fishing rods, and putting that money towards environmental agencies. 

These funding approaches can help realign the priorities within wildlife agencies to better support native species and the values of their constituents outside the hunting and angling community, Lute said.

“Increased funding for conservation is good for everybody,” she told me. “Whether or not you wildlife-watch or hunt or fish, everyone benefits from a healthy ecosystem.”

Clarification, March 23, 6:30 pm: This story, originally published March 20, has been updated to clarify Trout Unlimited’s policy position on stocking nonnative fish.

For the past quarter century, the future of monarch butterflies has looked dire, with these iconic American insects flitting toward extinction. Now, however, there is at least a small reason for hope: New data from WWF Mexico, a large conservation group, offers further evidence that the decline of eastern monarchs — the world’s largest population — has stopped, even as the insects face worsening threats across their range. 

Each fall, tens of millions of monarchs that live east of the Rocky Mountains migrate, rather miraculously, to the same forested region of central Mexico. The featherweight insects can be so plentiful there during winter that the tree branches droop under their collective weight. 

In December and January, researchers hike into the forest and measure the area of monarch-covered trees to estimate how abundant they are. And this winter, the numbers were up — monarchs aggregated in trees covering about 7.2 acres of forest in Mexico, up substantially from 4.4 acres the year before and from 2.2 acres the year before that.  

The new numbers are still way below the average from the first 10 years of monitoring (about 21 acres) and what scientists consider sustainable (about 15 acres). But they still amount to good news, said Karen Oberhauser, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and one of the nation’s leading monarch experts. 

“We are in a period of relative stability where the population has stopped declining,” Oberhauser, who was not involved in the new WWF Mexico report, told me.

Oberhauser largely attributes the latest monarch bump to weather — there was plenty of rain last year in the middle of the country, along the butterflies’ migratory path, providing adult monarchs with lots of flowers to feed on. But it’s also a sign, she said, that scattered efforts across the country to restore milkweed are helping monarchs hold on. (Even in the middle of New York City, small private gardens and city parks are fueling monarchs.) 

“Our efforts can make a difference,” Oberhauser said.

The crash in US monarch populations is largely rooted in perhaps an unexpected source: genetically modified seeds. A few decades ago, farmers across the Midwest began planting new corn and soybean seeds that were modified to withstand a common herbicide known as glyphosate. That made it easier for farmers to spray their fields and kill the weeds growing in them.

Milkweed, the only plant that monarch caterpillars can eat, was one such weed. And as it vanished in the 1990s, so did monarchs. 

Responding to this decline, the Biden administration proposed at the end of 2024 to list monarchs as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the strongest wildlife law in the country. Before the listing was finalized, however, Donald Trump’s second term began. In September, his administration punted the decision, and indicated it would not make a final rule in the next 12 months. A spokesperson for the US Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed that it does not expect to issue a final rule before late September 2026.

Two environmental groups have since sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service — the federal agency that enforces the Endangered Species Act — in an effort to set a binding date by which it needs to finalize the rule. When that happens, it’s possible that the administration could grant the species protection or reverse course and decide that protection isn’t warranted, said Lori Nordstrom, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service official, who was closely involved in the 2024 proposal to list monarchs as threatened. 

“The US Fish and Wildlife Service continues to evaluate the monarch butterfly using the best available science and in accordance with all requirements of the Endangered Species Act,” the agency spokesperson told Vox. “The administration continues to emphasize voluntary, locally driven conservation as a proven tool for supporting species and reducing the need for additional federal regulation.”

Still, however, both eastern and western monarch populations are at historic lows. Good weather can certainly boost their numbers for a year, like we have seen last winter. But bad weather, too, can precipitate future declines — and monarch populations don’t have much room for more loss. Researchers suspect that climate change is likely to worsen weather conditions for monarchs. 

To truly stabilize monarch populations — and to make them more resilient in the face of further warming — they will need more than a few patches of milkweed. “We need to regain a lot of habitat to be able to get numbers back up,” Nordstrom said. “We are still a long way from where we need to be.” 

It’s pretty much impossible to live a life free of environmental harm. The cleanest energy relies on mining. Critical medical supplies produce plastic waste. Even organic foods are typically grown with pesticides.

But there is one thing you could do immediately that would help the planet a heck of a lot: eat less beef. 

I know, I know; for most omnivores, beef is hard to give up. The cheeseburger is one of the only truly American foods, and meat-free alternatives are not yet perfect mimics (though, in taste, some plant-based products come extremely close). 

Yet, the data is incredibly clear and incredibly compelling: Of all the foods we produce on Earth, beef is the No. 1 destroyer of forests, and especially rainforests. Raising cattle for meat not only endangers wildlife but fuels climate change — in a big way. 

That’s one takeaway of a large-scale analysis of global deforestation published today in Nature Food. The study authors explored where around the world trees have disappeared over the last two decades and then linked that loss to dozens of different commodities grown on land, from cattle and corn to coffee and cacao.

The results — captured in the chart above — reveal that beef has driven about 120 million acres of forest destruction globally between 2001 and 2022, an area larger than the state of California. And most of that loss was in the tropics, the analysis shows, in places like the Amazon rainforest that are teeming with wildlife. 

Other commodities, like oil palm and soy, also replaced millions of acres of tropical forest in the past two decades, the analysis shows. Manufacturers use palm oil — the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world — to make everything from peanut butter to mascara. Much of the world’s soy beans, meanwhile, are not bound to become tofu but are, in fact, fed to farm animals like chickens and pigs. 

One surprising result from the study is that many staple foods, like maize, rice, and cassava — commodities that tend to draw far more attention for their environmental impact — have a larger deforestation footprint than cocoa or coffee. Global risk assessments tend to overlook those staples, perhaps because they’re less commonly exported to wealthy economies, according to Chandrakant Singh, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. The new study may, however, be underestimating the impact of chocolate and coffee farms, said Liz Goldman, co-director of the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch at World Resources Institute, a nonprofit environmental group.

“The analysis is strong,” said Goldman, who was not involved in the new study but published a similar analysis in 2022. “The important thing to keep in mind is that there are some data limitations coming through in the results.” It’s still challenging for researchers to detect the expansion of cocoa or coffee farms, Goldman said. Scientists typically rely on satellite imagery to monitor crops, but commodities like cocoa and coffee often grow among naturally occurring trees and can look, in a satellite analysis, like natural forest — even though they typically have less biodiversity. 

Beyond tallying acres of razed forest, the new paper also estimated how much carbon emissions that deforestation produced. Farmers and ranchers often clear trees by burning them, which releases the carbon stored in the trunks and branches back into the atmosphere.

Beef, once again, came in way ahead. The analysis suggested that raising cattle for meat created more than 20,000 megatons (or million metric tons) of carbon dioxide just in the past two decades through its impact on forests alone. That’s equivalent to more than three times the yearly emissions of the US. And it doesn’t include the greenhouse gas emissions that stem from cow burps or the crops grown to feed them. 

The good news here is that, without question, consumers can help rainforests by eating less beef — even if they don’t live in the tropics. The US, for example, still imports a lot of cattle meat from Brazil, where cows are known to graze on cleared Amazon jungle. Singh hopes that his new study motivates consumers to pay more attention to where their food is coming from.

But, at least for now, global demand for beef is continuing to grow, as rising wealth in countries like China makes beef more accessible.

The assumption among many people who work with forest data is that “more information will yield better outcomes,” Goldman, of Global Forest Watch, told Vox. “But it seems like that’s not the case here, unfortunately. I’m not sure what it will take to change behavior around this.”

Disclosure: Benji Jones, this story’s author, worked at Global Forest Watch as a research analyst from 2013 to 2015.

For several decades now, the story of the world’s rainforests has been the same tragic one: These iconic, animal-filled ecosystems are getting cut down to make way for farms and ranches, roads and mines. And it doesn’t appear to be changing. In 2024, the most recent year of global forest data, the tropics lost a record 16.6 million acres of primary forest, largely to fires and agriculture. More than half of that recent loss was in Brazil and Bolivia. 

But one country has a very different narrative: Costa Rica.

In the late 20th century, Costa Rica — a Central American nation a little smaller than West Virginia — had one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. The country was losing more than 100,000 acres a year. And by 1985, forests covered less than 25 percent of its area, down from closer to three-quarters just a few decades earlier. 

But then, near the start of the millennium, the trend abruptly flipped. Deforestation plummeted, and trees started growing back. Now, natural forests blanket well over half of Costa Rica, making it one of the few places on Earth that has revived its lost ecosystems. 

How did Costa Rica do it? 

One reason that gets a lot of attention is that Costa Rica put a price tag on nature — on the natural “services” that forests provide, from sucking up planet-warming carbon dioxide to sustaining the local water supply. Nearly three decades ago, the country began paying private landowners for those services, if they conserve or restore forests on their property. That created a concrete, financial incentive to keep forests standing. Costa Rica was the first country in the world to implement a national “payment for ecosystem services” scheme. 

In the decades since, as Costa Rica’s forests came back, other countries followed in its footsteps, like Mexico and Vietnam, developing programs of their own that subsidized forest conservation. Together they fueled the idea, still popular in the conservation community, that you can save nature by valuing it in economic terms — terms that everyone, including capitalists, can understand. 

But there’s still an open question: Do these payment programs actually work? 

There has now been more than 20 years of research from Costa Rica on the program’s impact on forests. And a new study, published this month, looks more specifically at how the payment system affects biodiversity — the collecting of animals that live within them. These studies complicate the story of how Costa Rica became lush again. 

Costa Rica’s groundbreaking payment for ecosystem services program, briefly explained 

Part of what made Costa Rica’s ecosystem payment program so groundbreaking is that it recognized — at the highest level of government — that living forests are not only a source of timber, but are economically valuable for lots of other reasons: they reduce greenhouse gases, produce clean water, draw tourists, and are home to plants and animals that scientists use for biology research and drug development.

In simple terms, the government pays landowners who enroll in the program for every hectare (roughly 2.5 acres) of forest that they protect or replenish by planting new trees. They receive more or less money, depending on how they manage their land. By planting native trees in a degraded landscape, for example, landowners can earn more than $170 per hectare per year, on average, for the duration of the contract (16 years for planting native trees). If a property owner protects existing natural forest on their land, meanwhile, they earn between roughly $44 and $110 per hectare per year. If they let forests regrow naturally on pastureland, they earn less. 

At first, the government funded the program through a tax on fuel, such as gasoline. Now it also raises funds to pay landowners from other sources, such as a fee on water usage. The idea is that people who use services that forests provide should help pay for them. Forests help maintain rainfall by pumping water into the air through transpiration. They also help prevent pollution and sediment from entering the water supply.

The program provides what is essentially a subsidy for the lost opportunity that could come from farming or ranching on the land, said Giacomo Delgado, a doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland, who is studying the impacts of the program. “If that payment wasn’t there, you can imagine that a lot of people would continually clear the forest,” he told Vox. 

To date, the government has more than 20,000 contracts for payments with landowners, a spokesperson told Vox, and the program currently covers 540,000 hectares of forest — an area a little smaller than the state of Delaware. 

Was paying landowners the secret to Costa Rica’s success?

For years now scientists have debated about whether or not these sorts of payment schemes actually work. Yet despite more than two decades of research, the answer is still elusive.

I reviewed more than a dozen studies from Costa Rica, and on the whole, they suggest that the program has had a modest positive impact on forests overall — but not a big one. A comprehensive 2008 study by the World Bank, in the northeastern region of Sarapiquí, determined that the program led to “a small but statistically significant increase in the area of forest conserved.” Other studies that analyzed the early years of the program indicate that it didn’t reduce deforestation or only worked in some regions. 

A more current analysis, led by the Inter-American Development Bank, detected a drop in deforestation on land that was part of the program. Yet the results were only significant (statistically speaking) for the first year after enrollment. There also wasn’t much deforestation to begin with. A 2024 paper, meanwhile, found that forest cover increased on farmland after it was enrolled in the program, but the study couldn’t definitively attribute those increases to the payment system. 

Then there’s this new study — an analysis, led by Delgado of ETH Zurich, that looks beyond forests to the wildlife within them. The research compares the biodiversity present on land inside and outside the payment program to healthy baseline forests in northwest Costa Rica. And it does so using sound. A healthy tropical forest produces a distinct, complex noise, comprising the calls of frogs, birds, and insects. Damaged ecosystems sound quieter and simpler. 

Delgado and his collaborators put microphones in different landscapes and analyzed the sounds they picked up. As they discovered, land in the payment program — on which forests were naturally regenerating on old farmland — were far more similar to healthy, old forests than to pastures that were not enrolled in the program. You can actually listen to some of the recordings here. “It’s a strong signal that [the payment program] is working for biodiversity,” said Laura Villalobos, a Costa Rican economist at Salisbury University, who was not involved in the study. 

There’s no silver bullet for protecting forests and biodiversity

The major drawback of many studies on Costa Rica’s pioneering payment program — including this new one — is that they don’t show that the forests or biodiversity have recovered because of the program. “What’s really challenging is the issue of causality,” said Hilary Brumberg, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University, who was not involved in the acoustics study. “There are just so many confounding factors,” said Brumberg, who studies Costa Rica’s forests.

There are many other reasons why forests in Costa Rica may have grown back. In 1996, for example, the government effectively banned deforestation in the country, making it illegal to convert natural forests to other kinds of land (though some logging is still permitted). Around the same time, the price of beef collapsed. That made clearing land for cattle less profitable and caused some landowners to abandon their pastures. Meanwhile, the country’s ecotourism industry ballooned, providing incentives to keep the country’s iconic forest ecosystems intact. 

Importantly, Costa Rica also has a more pervasive environmental ethic compared to other forested nations. In fact, research suggests that some people join the payment program not for the money but because they want to contribute to forest conservation as a public good. 

Obviously, something is working. Costa Rica is green again. But the payment program has likely played only a small part in the country’s success. 

That’s consistent with research beyond Costa Rica, which finds that compensating landowners for ecosystem services has a positive but small impact. Ultimately, these sorts of programs haven’t been the solution to deforestation that environmental advocates were hoping for, said David Simpson, a now-retired environmental economist. “Trying to make nature valuable, it turns out, has had a disappointing track record,” Simpson wrote in 2018. 

In response to a request for comment, Karla Alfaro Rojas, director of the Department of Institutional Communications for the Costa Rican government, said, in an email: “Costa Rica doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. We are an international leader in financial mechanisms and forest cover restoration.”

In a world with so many environmental problems, perhaps it seems unproductive to critique a program that is, if anything, helping conserve tropical forests. But there is an important lesson here: No one solution, no one model, will solve a problem as difficult as deforestation. Costa Rica was successful because it had all of the right pieces in place — strong policies, favorable economics, growing non-extractive industries, and, perhaps most importantly, political will.