Launched in 2025, the What’s Next for Nature? essay forum seeks to give voice to a wide variety of perspectives about the complex relationships between our human-created systems of economics, law, and political science and the vibrant, complex, and life-giving planet we call home. Each series is meant to be informative and provocative in this make-or-break era when our species alone holds the fate of Life on Earth in its hands.
Our inaugural series of essays, published below, explores the relationship between conservation and democracy. Multiple essayists from across the continent are generously sharing their diverse ideas, reflections, and experiences of the intimate connection between democracy and conservation. The triumvirate of democratic renewal, reciprocity, and the regeneration of nature runs through all of them—a shimmering thread of human awareness about our unique responsibility for life on our planet.
We hope you find the essays inspiring and thought-provoking, and that you will take a moment to share their insights and visions for an abundant future with others.
January 2026 Essays:
Democracy and an invitation to dream
Standing near a battered railing inside the Little Colorado River Navajo Tribal Park, I watch as a dozen ravens draft upward in thermal air currents, swirling and rising until they tumble in a controlled fall, chasing each other in pairs back over the canyon rim. A Diné woman speaks to our small group about...
By Jordana Barrack
JANUARY 2026
The possibilities and precarity of re-centring Indigenous stewardship in Parks Canada
As a young democratic nation, Canada and its parks have grown up together. In that sense, national parks are not just protected landscapes—they are public institutions that reflect who we understand ourselves to be...
By Allison Bishop
JANUARY 2026
Democracy Built on Care
The phone call was always brief. "Come get some moose soup," my tsook’al (grandmother) would say, or "I baked bread." The click of her hanging up echoed in my ear before I could respond. Even as a young child, I understood what it meant: get over there quickly. There might be cinnamon rolls. Three blocks separated our house ...
By Nikoosh Carlo
JANUARY 2026
When the Public Square Falls Silent: The Right to Protest, Environmental Protection, and the Dangers of Democratic Backsliding
In 1983, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s totalitarian dictator, launched the “Program for the Comprehensive Development...
By Andre Carothers & Annie Leonard
JANUARY 2026
Guardians of Land and Democracy: The Essential Role of Tribal Nations in Conservation
Across the United States, the movement to protect land, water, and biodiversity increasingly intersects with questions of justice, sovereignty, and democratic participation. Tribal Nations—long excluded from national conversations about land...
By James Rattling Leaf, Sr.
JANUARY 2026
Democracy and Conservation: Integrity at the Edge
In the long march of planetary evolution, nature has experimented endlessly, generating, refining, and discarding entire ways of living. What is usually called the biosphere is less a finished masterpiece than a restless mosaic, always in motion, shaped by tension, disturbance, and adaptation...
By Karina Ugarte & Lorenzo de Rosenzweig
JANUARY 2026
November 2025 Essays:
Nature States: the Rise and Fall and Rise of Bioregions
Nation states are failing before our eyes.
Convulsions in seemingly every corner of the globe appear to be beyond the design specifications of our national and international agencies and institutions to solve for.
Nation states are not just struggling but are manifestly refusing...
By Ian Gill
NOVEMBER 2025
The Power of People and Place in the Fight for Our Land, Water, and Climate
Western communities know the difference between responsible resource development and reckless exploitation on the public lands they love, and they are seeing policy decisions coming from Washington, DC, that are wildly out of balance...
By Jessica Maher
NOVEMBER 2025
Democracy Remade: Regeneration as Civic Practice
We are living in the age of broken inheritances. The systems we have received—political, economic, ecological—were not built for the world now unfolding. Every generation inherits a set of arrangements it did not choose, and ours has inherited their unraveling. Democracies fail...
By Natalie Montecino
NOVEMBER 2025
July 2025 Essays:
Bridging the Great Divide: Reconnecting Rural and Urban Communities by Building Democracy
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
This phrase suggests that internal conflict and division will inevitably lead to failure or destruction...
By Richard L. Knight & Erik Glenn
JULY 2025
Landscapes and the geography of democracy
Collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship is a powerful mechanism for bringing people together, bridging divides, and rebuilding truth and trust—and for finding, in a literal common ground, the figurative common ground upon which democracy rests...
By Jonathan Peterson
JULY 2025
Sea Change
I used to live in a world of objects, and now I live in a world of subjects.
—Evolutionary ecologist Dr. Monica Gagliardi, discussing plants.
Let’s begin with a premise: that to address our planetary crises, we must expand our ideas of democracy.
Fundamentally, life on Earth is rich with subjects...
By Emily Johnston
JULY 2025
Collaborative Conservation: Building Habits of Democracy
One Fall some years ago, I hiked a stretch of trail in Glacier National Park. I then hiked another stretch in Waterton National Park in Canada. I savored the magnificence of these two places—the vistas of craggy peaks...
By Lynn Scarlett
JULY 2025
True Connection Among Friends: Our Common Future
Despite our growing global interdependence, many countries are choosing to ignore or directly damage biodiversity at the cost of their own future and that of the rest of the world. Faltering regional alliances and...
By Dr. Rodrigo Medellin
JULY 2025
Climate Capable Democracy
My thesis here is that American democracy today is a major cause of the climate crisis and to address the crisis we need a transformation of our democracy. Democratic political action must be the spearhead of the attack on climate destruction, and for that America needs a climate-capable...
By Gus Speth
JULY 2025
We are pleased to share materials from external experts, presented as contributions to public discourse. The thoughts expressed herein belong solely to the authors, reflect the judgment of the authors as of the date of publication, are subject to change, and do not necessarily represent the official views or values of the Salazar Center.
About the Art
The Salazar Center is honored to have commissioned original artwork from Scott Nieto of Santo Domingo Pueblo for our inaugural What’s Next for Nature forum series on Nature and Democracy.
Optimal Blend depicts the blending of elements to achieve ideal balance. Everything in the artwork is mirrored, though not symmetrical. It shows a world that is imperfect but balanced.
© 2025 Scott Nieto. All rights reserved.