My New York county voted for Trump and approved raising taxes to protect and restore nature.

Why? Water.

I live in one of the most purple places in the USA, Suffolk County on Long Island. This year, there was a single local proposition that was on the ballot.

Ballot Proposition 2, the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act.

The proposition had two main components:

1. $2 billion to protect clean drinking water by conserving open space and wildlife habitats.

2. $4 billion to modernize wastewater infrastructure and protect Long Island’s waters from nitrogen pollution.

Going into the election this past fall, as I saw most of my neighbors with signs supporting Republican candidates filling their lawns. And not only was this proposition calling for increasing spending for an environmental cause, it would increase sales taxes by 1/8th of a percent.

Funding the environment and increasing taxes in an area that voted Republican up and down the ballot in 2020? I thought this proposition didn’t have a chance.

But as the votes were tallied in November, I was shocked to see that Proposition 2 had passed.

And not only had it passed, it passed with 71% of the vote. 2.5x more people voted for the proposition than opposed it.

Nature is nonpartisan - is water the most?

In 2023, The Nature Conservancy released a national survey of American voters, “The Language of Conservation: Updated Recommendations on How to Communicate Effectively to Build Support for Conservation.”

They found broad support across what they called the “Five W’s”:

1. Water

2. Wildlife

3. Way of Life

4. Wildfires

5. Working Farms and Ranches and the Goods they Produce

Biodiversity has been and continues to be the main focus of the nature and conservation movements. And there is clear support for wildlife. The survey found that,

60% of American voters say that “conserving and restoring wildlife habitat” should be a “very important” goal of conservation efforts.

But when we look at support for water, the same survey found that,

83% of American voters say that protect sources of drinking water is “very important”.

So I find myself asking the question, if we would have called Proposition 2, the “Rewilding Long Island Act”, would it have passed? My gut says no.

Yes, people love animals and most people love wildlife, but most people don’t interact with wildlife every day. Most people don’t depend on wildlife for their health. Most people don’t depend on wildlife to survive (or when they do they don’t know it).

Everyone depends on water.

We are finally at a turning point, tragic that we have reached it already, where nature’s ability to produce the clean water that we drink and the clean water we need to produce the things we consume is starting to wane. And it’s entirely our fault. We have degraded nature so much, that it cannot keep up with our needs.

Across the Northeastern US, people woke up last November to smoky skies as wildfires burned across 5 states. After the driest fall in decades, New York City imposed a “drought watch”. The reservoirs that serve New York City are typically at 79% overall capacity. As of Nov. 8, they were running well below that level, at 63.6%.

And that capacity would be drastically lower if NYC wouldn’t have invested decades ago in protecting and reforesting from cattle pasture the Catskills and other forests across the region to ensure those reservoirs were refilled every year.

Why Water? Why Now?

The Trump administration has at least verbally signaled that clean water will be a priority for the administration. And I believe that water is not only the best way to make progress on protecting and restoring nature during this administration, but as the first part of this article demonstrates, water is likely the best “gateway” to getting more of the general public to care about nature and to get back into relationship with it (more on this later).

Globally, four billion people — almost two thirds of the world’s population —  experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year.

In the US, a 2023 New York Times analysis reported that 45% of water wells have shown a significant decline in water levels since 1980, with 40% reaching record-low levels in the past decade.

As I’ve written before, when we look at private and public sector dependence on nature, ecosystem services associated with water are the greatest source of that dependence. Nature, via ecosystem services, is critical for the quantity, quality and temporality of water resources.

But the problem is, we value water at the point of consumption, but not at the point of production. We’ve been free-riding on nature to deliver the water we need, but those natural systems that delivered that water for human use for millennia, are now beginning to break. We’ve never had to pay nature to produce the water, but if we don’t start now, then it won’t continue to produce.

We must make the production of water by nature as financially attractive to land stewards as producing other goods and services from that land.

And this can be a bridge between urban and rural communities. Just like NYC depends on the Catskills, urban areas around the world depend on rural areas to produce the water they depend on for survival. And rural areas depend on those same water sources. Yes we need to find the right balance of land for producing water and land for producing food, but we at least need to value land that produces water so that we can continue to produce the food (which requires water!).

Imagine a nationwide initiative where urban areas invest in rural areas to protect and restore ecosystems to recharge aquifers and reservoirs so that cities have clean and dependable water sources and that rural areas have well water that is clean and dependable.

Imagine urban leaders going out into rural areas and working with rural leaders to make investments in nature as critical water infrastructure and creating new jobs to protect and restore water generating and regulating ecosystems across the US.

Imagine this happening in countries around the world.

Water to bring humans back into relationship with non-human nature

The challenge and opportunity for the nature movement is making the economic case for investing in nature as the production facility for water and being willing to pay land stewards for protecting and restoring ecosystems that deliver that water.

Yes, I know this feels like a step away from the intrinsic motivation to protect and restore nature, but when the vast majority of humanity has lost that connection, maybe we need extrinsic motivators to remind us why we depend on nature, to perhaps start to bring us back to that intrinsic motivation. And ultimately, hopefully we can work our way back into full embodying and internalizing our full interdependence with nature, but this is the work of multiple generations.

If we want to start to internalize the value of nature into the economy.

If we want to start to bring people back into relationship with non-human nature.

If we want to make bipartisan progress on nature.

If we want to get bring more people into the climate conversation.

If we want to find common ground across the partisan divides that have formed in the US and around the world.

If we want to reforge relationships between people living in cities and people living in rural areas.

Then we should lead with water.

- Eric

P.S. I think we would benefit from a new non-technical term for “Ecosystem Services” to reach the masses. The TNC report suggested “nature’s benefits”, but my gut says there is something else out there…

Any ideas?