Mr. President,

I’m writing this not as an activist or a political antagonist but as a mother.

I have two young children. They are still small enough to believe that adults generally keep them safe, that rules protect the vulnerable, and that the world they inherit will be at least as livable as the one I grew up in. But after just one year of your administration’s environmental decisions, every day it feels like I’m having to recalibrate that hope.

This is my most important job — being a mom to two.

In your first year back in office, your administration has set in motion one of the most sweeping reversals of environmental policy in U.S. history. On day one, you withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, abandoning the emissions targets and the reliability on which other countries relied. Since then, your EPA has weakened air pollution limits on power plants and vehicles, rolled back mercury and soot standards, delayed methane leak regulations, and scrubbed mentions of human-caused climate change from its own website. Offshore wind projects: halted. Clean energy tax credits: restricted. Environmental justice reviews: eliminated from federal decision-making. These rollbacks will cost hundreds of lives and billions in preventable health costs.

These aren’t hypothetical shifts. These are measurable changes to rules that govern what we breathe, drink, and build our communities around.

What often gets lost in policy debates is that clean air and safe water are not partisan luxuries. Every American, including your staunchest supporters, needs air that doesn’t make their children wheeze and water that doesn’t make them sick. These aren’t conservative values or liberal talking points, but human needs.

When environmental protections are rolled back, the consequences don’t show up as sterile policy bullet points. They show up as higher asthma rates in schoolchildren, as communities with contaminated wells, as smoke-choked summers that keep families indoors, and as health costs that fall hardest on those least able to shoulder them. They show up in the everyday lived experience of families trying to raise kids in a livable environment.

Even people who enthusiastically support your leadership — farmers, small-town residents, oil-and-gas communities — depend on predictable weather, safe water, and healthy air. Removing protections doesn’t make pollution disappear; it simply transfers its costs from industry to individuals, from corporations to communities, and from the present generation to the next.

Leadership isn’t just about representing the voters who put you in office. It’s about protecting the people who cannot advocate for themselves. It’s about recognizing that environmental decisions are both intersectional and intergenerational. They shape the world not just for today, but for decades.

This letter isn’t about anger but about expectation that those in power will protect the most basic conditions that make life possible, that economic growth and environmental protection need not be enemies, and that decisions today should not mortgage our children’s tomorrow.

My children will live in a world shaped by your choices. So will millions of others who had no vote but will have to live with its consequences.

I hope you remember that.

Sincerely,
Lizzie Horvitz

Founder of Finch, Sustainability Expert and, most importantly, mother of two.