We were very intrigued by the launch of the President's "Make America Beautiful Again Commission" which seeks to have a renewed focus on conservation in America.

We learned that a big part of the impetus for this creation came from a new group called Nature Is Nonpartisan. We are very interested and intrigued by the concept, because, well, it's true that in a good world nature would be nonpartisan. And as the Republican coalition changes to be more crunchy, as evidenced by MAHA Moms, interest in nature and conservation should be increased. We certainly get that from conversations with younger Republicans, who are very interested in protecting the environment, while concerned that in doing so they might give ground to communists on the left.

So we had a conversation with Amelia Joy, who runs comms for Nature Is Nonpartisan. The interview was lightly edited for clarity.

PolicySphere: What is Nature Is Nonpartisan?

Amelia Joy: We're founded by Benji Backer, who's a 27 year old CEO, but he's been doing work in the environmental space since he was ten years old. This is his life passion. Our mission is exactly what the what the name implies: that we believe that nature should be a nonpartisan issue and that in America, it can be. When we look at polling statistics from the late '60s and early 70s, you see that about 75% of Americans self-identified as environmentalists. Today, that number is down to about 40%. But when we talk to people and ask them about the issues themselves, they overwhelmingly agree that nature is are important and that it should be a priority across party lines. But political division and a lack of discourse has drawn a line between the political right and the political left when it comes to the environment. And so our mission is twofold. It's both a cultural movement, getting everyday Americans to talk to people who they might disagree with on 99% of the other issues, and also a political movement, working with members of Congress and sharing that the American people expect action on these things, and that they're overwhelmingly popular issues.

PolicySphere: Devil's advocate question. In my experience, where you look at polls that say 80%-plus of Americans support something, that support is very deep but also very shallow, because they support it but they don't support it if there are tradeoffs. And it doesn't determine their votes. So saying that something is popular in polls doesn't necessarily mean that it translates to political impact.

Amelia Joy: Getting people to realize that there is that agreement is an important first step, though, because our division is so strong and runs so deep that these conversations aren't even happening anymore. Individuals live within their own echo chambers and never hear from people who disagree with. If you and I both think we need to protect the bald eagle, we might disagree on how we should go about doing that, but right now, those conversations aren't happening at all. And I think that a lack of political discourse and not having those conversations in the long run can put the entire democratic system at risk. And so having those conversations, and realizing that there is agreement, and stopping the labeling of people who disagree with you is a critical first step to then opening the door to those conversations. We can say, okay, well, I think about it this way, and I would rather implement a policy like this. And someone else wants to implement a policy like that. And maybe there's 55 to 60% of things within two drafts of a bill, let's say, that do overlap. Well, that's 60% more than we started with. So a win is a win, at least right now compared to nothing. And so that's where we come in. I don't think our target audience is either extreme. There's probably 10% of people on the left who would never want to work with a Republican, would never open the door to working with us after we worked on an executive order with this administration. There's probably 10% of Republicans who are too far right to even admit that climate change is real. That's not our target audience, right? Our target audience is that a set that fall somewhere in between.

PolicySphere: Fair enough. So, tell us more about your work on the Make America Beautiful Again Commission EO.

Amelia Joy: We were really proud to work with the Trump administration on the Make America Beautiful Again executive order. We brought together a coalition of both center right and center left environmental NGOs to work on the content of this executive order. And then we had several meetings with the Domestic Policy Council and the white House and then also the relevant cabinet secretaries; with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum; at USDA with Brooke Rollins; at EPA with Lee Zeldin. And we really just shared with them what I said was our mission for Nature Is Nonpartisan, that Americans care about these issues. They expect action on these issues. And it's largely a winning issue for the President, because there are very few issues in America where you get 80% of people agreeing on something. But they do agree that we need clean air and clean water. But President Trump has taken action on the environment before. During his first term, he passed the Great American Outdoors Act, which was the largest investment in our national parks since President Teddy Roosevelt. His administration, during his first term, got more recovered, more endangered and threatened species than any other administration in American history. He established the Trillion Trees program. But very few of those things received kind of the widespread attention and coverage that I think they deserved. And so we came to them with Make America Beautiful Again, almost as the marketing piece. Saying, we understand that the President and this administration is already prioritizing these things and is probably going to take action on conservation anyways, but brand it as Make America Beautiful again, so that President Trump can actually leave a lasting legacy on conservation and be remembered as a president who was good for nature and for the outdoors.

PolicySphere: Looking forward to the future. What do you think would be a good Republican agenda on the environment?

Amelia Joy: I think the the first place that my head goes when I think about conservation for conservative Republicans is access. It's increasing access for public lands. National parks. Whether that's recreational access, or access for hunting and angling. A lot of these conservatives, especially from the more rural states in the middle of America, come from generations of farmers and ranchers who have worked the land their entire lives. And so they have a passion for the land because that's where they get their food. That's where they get their livelihoods. That's where they go for sport. And so their biggest concern is the access to those lands for future generations so that their kids and their grandkids can grow up hunting just like they did.

It's also the the overreach of the federal government. They feel, and I agree with them, that they know their homeland better than anyone else, that they understand the intricacies of the land that they're farming and the land that they're recreating on. And I know that a lot of people in the middle of America who have property, whose farms overlap with some of the BLM land have to jump through a lot more hoops to be able to be able to do their own conservation efforts on their land. And so I think there are things to do around the bureaucracy around land management.

Besides that, I think you look at forest management is another area where Republicans have some distrust of the government and also just some frustration with how much bureaucracy is around it. I live in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of D.C., and I've talked to several kind of state and local leaders in Virginia about their their frustrations around forest fires because so many of the forests, so much of the forest land in Virginia is owned by the U.S. Forest Service, and so is not state owned. And so when a wildfire does break out, the state and local forces are legally not allowed to go in and take care of their forests. They can't do the prescribed burns to take care of their forests in the long run. So I think more federal-state partnerships around forests would be really important for conservatives. It goes back to that instinct that the people who are closest to the issues are the ones who know it best, which is a thread through through most Republican ideology. And I think that's especially true with environmental issues. And I think it's why Republicans have sometimes been painted as a kind of enemy to the environment, because a lot of the more liberal solutions are about adding more federal government. And for the most part, it's not that most Republicans necessarily disagree that these things are important and that we need to do something about them, it's that they don't want the federal government coming in and managing it for them.

So those would be the main issues I would focus on.