This essay was first published on The Access Granted Group’s Substack. You can visit and subscribe to The Access Granted Group’s (@accessgrantedgroup) Substack content here.
In New Orleans this past February, roughly one in five home sales under contract was canceled. The buyers could not secure affordable insurance.
The reason most of those buyers could not secure insurance was not a national market trend. It was specific to their area’s nature loss challenges. Since 1932, coastal Louisiana has lost about 1,883 square miles of land — a quarter of what it had — an area the size of Delaware. That works out to roughly a football field every hour. Beginning in the 1930s, oil and gas companies dredged a canal network through those marshes that stretched 10,000 miles, four times the length of the Mississippi River. Those canals fragmented the wetlands and accelerated their collapse. Federal levee policy on the Mississippi cut off the sediment that built the delta in the first place. Climate change is now compounding both.
Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana has called wetland loss a battle the state has to fight to protect its seafood industry and brace against hurricanes. He is right about the stakes. These wetlands once absorbed floodwaters and protected the coast from hurricane wave action before it reached people's homes. The decisions that produced this altered, less protective coastline were made by industries that profited from them and federal agencies that enabled them. The bill — in the form of rising insurance premiums — is being paid by working families who had nothing to do with the decisions and not enough power to stop them.
This is what nature loss looks like when it reaches a household: not as an environmental story, but as a line item in a budget that no longer balances.
The land disappearing into the Gulf is the homeland of the United Houma Nation, the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, whose members became the first federally-recognized climate-displaced community in the United States when their island home became uninhabitable. The lost wetlands were not only buffering storm surge for working families. They were the territories of sovereign Nations whose existence on the land predates Louisiana, the United States, and the oil and gas industry that dredged the canals.
The same governing decisions that stripped these Nations of authority over their territories stripped the coast of the buffers that kept insurance affordable. Exclusion from decision-making power is not only a rights violation. It is a policy outcome that working families are now paying for.
The statewide average homeowners insurance premium in Louisiana hit $4,031 in 2024. In coastal parishes, the layered cost of homeowners, flood, and windstorm coverage can approach $14,000 a year. Cherice Harrison-Nelson, a retired schoolteacher in New Orleans, watched her insurance premium rise from $2,400 to $4,200 in two years, doubling her monthly housing payment. She fell three months behind in 2023. “As I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to have a more leisurely life,” she said. “Instead I have anxiety over just maintaining the basic need of housing.” She is one of more than 140 Habitat for Humanity homeowners in New Orleans now at imminent risk of foreclosure due to insurance costs alone.
This is what nature loss looks like when it reaches a household: not as an environmental story, but as a line item in a budget that no longer balances.
The households in New Orleans are not outliers. They are the leading edge of something most American families are beginning to feel, whether they can name it or not.
The disconnect
A Reuters/Ipsos poll from October 2025 found that two out of five Americans say cost-of-living will be the single biggest factor in how they vote, outpacing democracy, immigration, and crime combined. A separate Politico/Public First poll from November 2025 found that when Americans were asked which costs are most challenging, 45 percent said groceries, 38 percent said housing, and 31 percent said utility bills. Those are precisely the household budget lines where nature loss is now showing up.
Simultaneously, mainstream conservation has a class problem. Its most common arguments move people with the time and resources to act on them: people whose health insurance is covered, whose rent or mortgage is paid, whose grocery bill is not the first calculation of the week. When the country is in economic crisis, the majority of households cannot afford to make conservation their political priority. A movement that retains only the people with discretionary attention loses the political power it needs to defend its policy wins.
When the country is in economic crisis, the majority of households cannot afford to make conservation their political priority. A movement that retains only the people with discretionary attention loses the political power it needs to defend its policy wins.
Mainstream conservation also has a sovereignty problem, and the two are connected at the root. The same field infrastructure that talks about communities it does not live in was built on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples — much of the public land system itself was created by taking land without their consent and only in recent decades has meaningful consultation become a priority. Conservation’s missing constituencies and its missing power-sharing raise the same questions today: who holds the authority to make decisions about land, water, and life, and who has been kept out of the room while those decisions get made?
The communities most harmed by nature loss are largely the same communities that were seldom welcomed into the room where the decisions causing that loss were made. That is not a coincidence. It is the through-line.
Follow the land and water
In mid-April, the Bureau of Reclamation announced emergency operational changes to stabilize the Colorado River system, which supplies drinking water to more than 40 million people across seven states. Long-term drought has reduced system storage to roughly 36 percent of capacity. This year’s snowpack was the lowest on record, and Lake Powell’s projected inflow is just 29 percent of historical average, compounding a system already failing to hold what it receives. Without intervention, federal officials warned, hydropower at Hoover Dam could be reduced by as much as 40 percent later this year. The result reaches every utility bill in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, Albuquerque, San Diego, and Los Angeles, where ratepayers absorb the cost of desalination, long-distance pipelines, and water recycling.
Instead of waiting for people’s lives to change so they can prioritize nature in their voting decisions, the field must do the work of consistently connecting nature loss to the kitchen table issues that keep working class people up at night.
Wetlands tell the clearest version of the nature loss to budget hit story. Research from Columbia University and Resources for the Future, published in the American Economic Review, found that the country’s wetland loss between 2001 and 2016 now costs more than $600 million annually in flood damages absorbed by the National Flood Insurance Program and, through it, by every taxpayer. Restored wetlands take time to develop the function intact wetlands provide. The wetlands we have are doing work that the wetlands we restore cannot quickly replicate. Once they are gone, the cost of their absence shows up on insurance bills, in mortgage paperwork, and in the public budget. No restoration project can compensate quickly enough.
The Ogallala Aquifer supports a $35 billion agriculture-based economy across the Southwest and Great Plains, but, according to a Congressional report, “more than a quarter of it is now depleted to the point where it can no longer reliably support large-scale irrigation.” In Haskell County, Kansas, farmer Travis Leonard watched his operation go from more than a dozen irrigation wells to three. “It will happen to everybody eventually,” he said. Those costs reach grocery shelves nationwide, and they fall hardest on the rural households whose drinking water comes from the same wells. The water crisis now driving up utility bills and grocery prices across the country is, in part, the bill coming due on a century of basin governance that excluded the Tribal Nations with the oldest legal claims to the water and the deepest knowledge of how to steward it.
Who holds the authority to make decisions about land, water, and life, and who has been kept out of the room while those decisions get made?
What is possible when the people closest to a watershed lead the work to restore it is being demonstrated right now, on the largest scale ever attempted in the United States. The Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, and Klamath Tribes spent more than two decades fighting for the removal of four dams on the Klamath River across the California-Oregon border. They organized through fish kills, federal relicensing fights, and shareholder meetings of a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. They won. It took more than twenty years. The fourth dam came down in October 2024, opening more than 400 miles of spawning habitat across a 15,000-square-mile watershed that the four Nations have stewarded since time immemorial.
The economic effects are already visible. In 2025, nearly twice as many fall Chinook salmon returned to the Klamath Basin as scientists had projected. The river once supported a $150-million-per-year commercial salmon fishery and a Tribal subsistence fishery that fed multiple Tribal Nations year-round. The commercial season had been closed since 2022 because runs were too depleted to sustain it. As the salmon return, so does the possibility of recovering a food supply chain that puts wild-caught fish on tables across the West Coast, keeps prices within reach of families who could not afford them when the fishery was closed, and generates sustainable revenue for the Nations who made it a reality. The Klamath shows what becomes possible when sovereign Tribal Nations exercise governing authority over their territories — and it shows what nature restoration means for the cost of food.
Where the bill comes due
Nature loss does not stay in the landscape. It shows up at the checkout counter. Wild pollinators are the free labor that makes much of the American food supply possible. As native habitat disappears under development and monoculture expansion, that labor has to be hired. U.S. growers paid over $400 million in hired pollination services in 2024 alone, most of it concentrated in California and the Pacific Northwest, where apple and blueberry producers can no longer rely on wild pollinators to do the work that used to come free. That cost gets passed to consumers in the price of apples, blueberries, watermelons, cucumbers, and the long list of foods that stock the produce aisle.
The insurance market evaluates the combined effect of climate and nature loss on their insured assets, and households pay the bill. In wind-exposed areas alone, like where I live, a February 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office found that homes in areas with severe or extreme wind risk carry premiums roughly 58 percent higher, about $1,294 more per year, than similar homes in lower-risk areas. But wind is only one line of the bill. The wetlands that once absorbed storm surge are a fraction of what they were, the floodplains that held floodwaters have been built over, and the forests that historically slowed fire spread have been compromised by drought, by a century of fire suppression policy that left dense fuel loads behind, and by sprawl that put more homes directly in the path of fires that would once have burned through wildland and stopped. The fire suppression policy that produced today’s fuel loads also criminalized the cultural burning practices that Karuk, Yurok, Maidu, Miwok, and other Tribal Nations had used for millennia to maintain fire-adapted forests. Cultural fire revitalization led by the Karuk Tribe and partner Nations is now restoring the practices that built the buffers mainstream conservation is mourning.
Healthy forests do not produce catastrophic wildfires. Degraded forests do, especially when they are drought-stressed and ringed by housing developments. Climate change has raised the baseline risk. Nature loss has stripped the buffers that historically kept that risk from reaching people’s homes.
In California, one in five homes in the highest-risk wildfire areas has lost coverage since 2019, leaving more than 150,000 households uninsured. State Farm and Allstate halted new homeowners business in California in 2023, and State Farm later sought a double-digit rate increase after the January 2025 Los Angeles fires caused approximately $40 billion in insured losses, the costliest wildfire event ever recorded. A home that becomes uninsurable is a financial trap. The people most likely to be caught in it are not the people who made the land-use decisions that increased the risk.
The argument that needs to change
The conservation case is being made. The science and the policy have been there and are developing further. What is missing is the connection to a growing number of constituencies that care deeply about these issues and are being failed by a field that has not made it a priority to meet them where they are. Instead of waiting for people’s lives to change so they can prioritize nature in their voting decisions, the field must do the work of consistently connecting nature loss to the kitchen table issues that keep working class people up at night.
The murder of George Floyd produced a wave of public commitments from mainstream conservation organizations — to frontline leadership, to shared power, to doing the work differently. That wave has receded. What remains is a field largely reverting to form under the cover of political risk, breaking promises to the same communities it has always underserved. If institutional preservation continues to trump the field’s commitment to public service, the field loses trust with the very communities who can be most personally moved to act and elect leaders who are accountable to their policy needs.
I have spent more than fifteen years in conservation policy and coalition building, including helping to build one of the largest and most representative national coalitions in the field, more than 300 organizations, largely from frontline communities. I have sat in conference rooms full of leaders from organizations referred to by their acronyms, talking about communities none of them lived in, in language those communities would not recognize as describing them. The work that gets done in those rooms is not nothing. But it is not enough, and it cannot become enough without changing where the case is made, how it is made, and who is making it.
The work that gets done in those rooms is not nothing. But it is not enough, and it cannot become enough without changing where the case is made, how it is made, and who is making it.
The family watching their grocery bill rise in Las Cruces, in New Orleans, in rural Kansas has never read a conservation white paper and likely never will. They are getting their information from local TV news, from social media feeds, from podcasts on the commute, from conversations at work and church. Conservation is competing with the mortgage, the insurance bill, and the cost of groceries for a place in their attention. If the connection between nature loss and those costs is not living in those places, in language they recognize, elected officials will not feel the pressure to act. Issues that fail to break through in people’s daily lives quietly fall down the priority list of the people who run for office.
There are signs of what change can look like, in both message and action. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won his election by leading with affordability and is now governing that way, framing climate and sustainability as part of the same fight. “Affordability and sustainability go hand in hand,” he said this Earth Day. Atlanta has built one of the most ambitious municipal urban tree canopy and heat resilience programs in the country, treating shade and cooling as basic infrastructure for low-income households.
Some organizations are making this investment. Legal advocates have won court decisions upholding appliance efficiency standards projected to save households billions on utility bills. Others are pushing state legislatures to frame energy affordability and environmental protection as the same fight, and winning. Some are beginning to document how homeowners insurance costs connect to nature loss. These are not peripheral efforts. They are the work of connecting conservation’s most urgent arguments to the household budget lines where most families actually feel them. But, the affordability connection is not yet where mainstream conservation is leading. That has to change.
What changes the outcome is a conservation field genuinely present in community — listening in ways that shape policy until the people who live with the consequences feel ownership over it.
It will also require conservation to follow leadership it has too often dismissed. The 2026 election cycle is the test, and the next one is the verdict. The decisions that produced the costs in this piece, the dredged wetlands, the drained aquifers, the lost forests, the priced-out homeowners, were made by people and industries with access to power. They will keep getting made that way. What changes the outcome is a conservation field genuinely present in community — listening in ways that shape policy until the people who live with the consequences feel ownership over it, and supporting those communities into direct relationships with their representatives rather than standing between them and power. That ownership is what moves people to fight for policies when opponents come after them. It is what makes the movement stronger and the wins more durable.
The family in New Orleans watching their insurance bill arrive knows something is wrong. They do not yet have a movement that has bothered to explain what it is.
