It looks as if the outcome of this bitter election season will be a president, congress and judiciary with new plans for America, plans that might include some hard times ahead for the natural world and the rules and institutions we’ve built to help care for it.

However, even if things seem dark ahead, now is the very time we need to be bright and clear about our work, about what we are doing to make the world a better place. My experience, limited as it is, suggests that right now there is even greater need for our work, and that others will eventually see this and turn to it.

What is that work? Learning about how nature — land, climate, water and biodiversity — operates at the human scale; teaching our community, especially the next generation, about this natural world and our place in it as beneficiaries and stewards; and especially, showing the value of partnerships to find common ground and solve big challenges together.

This is work that the world and fellow travelers across our country need us to succeed at. The better we do this work, the more important it will be when the time comes and as a nation we embrace support for the environment. At that time, just as on Election Night, things may move swiftly, but in a direction able to sustain the world and more of us together in it.

This is a beautiful planet and place, and dark as things may feel at the moment, it is an important time to be alive, and perhaps more than ever to appreciate and even enjoy our lives and work in it.

Onward, for all of us,

Richard