I don’t know what the future holds; no one does. How else can you explain people pinning their hopes on the Minnesota Vikings (playoff losers to the Rams)? That said, we all take and consider the information we have and run it through our own biased view of the world to form a mix of hopes, fears and expectations about what is to come. From there we act. Sometimes it works out, other times, not so much.
Big changes are coming with the new federal administration. What will really happen is not yet clear.
The Trump campaign featured promises to pull back from efforts to slow climate change, increase the development of fossil fuels, increase exploitation of public lands, reduce environmental regulation, and a whole bunch of other things that will increase the pressure exerted on the environment of Cape Cod. The shifting of funding priorities likely spells the end of the kind of significant federal investment in resource restoration relied upon to fund the sizeable NOAA grants APCC was awarded in 2024.
While APCC has no meaningful control over what the incoming administration will do, we retain our voice and our own judgement about how to behave and to engage. While the specifics will come with time, APCC’s approach will be to encourage and support positive federal initiatives. But when it comes to harmful initiatives and environmental rollbacks, we will criticize that which warrants criticism.
APCC does control where we put our energy. Our plan for 2025 is to focus the bulk of our energy on local initiatives and work with our partners and Cape Cod towns and state government to deliver a better environment. As previously stated, we remain unwavering on our need to protect the Cape’s drinking water, to restore and protect our ponds and bays, to maintain natural open spaces, to heal impaired wetland resources, and equip people to live here more harmoniously with our environment.
APCC is committed to preventing the abuse of our remaining natural resources as a dumping ground for waste. APCC is prepared to fight for smarter development rules and land use polices to prevent a repetition of the housing development mistakes that have caused both our ecological and housing affordability problems.
Venerable former Harvard hockey coach, Bill Cleary, when asked how his team would prepare to play a particularly formidable opponent, would respond, “Let them worry about us.” That philosophy and approach is especially valid right now.
APCC does a lot of things very well and we are going to work with our membership to get done what there is to get done locally. What we will not allow ourselves to do is to become caught up in a preemptive self-reinforcing doom loop of anticipating and responding to real and perceived bad acts by the administration.
There is only so much time and energy to expend in the day, week, year or frankly the remainder of our lives. We choose to spend our time working toward a better environment and not allowing ourselves to become ineffective by being consumed by things beyond our control.
