Make the Interiors More Exterior

On the air we breathe, the places we love, and what we do now that Washington stopped protecting them

The last 500 feet up the Middle Teton couloir, it started to snow.

October in the Tetons moves fast. What had been a clear alpine morning was becoming something else, the mountain deciding, indifferently, that winter was arriving whether I was ready or not. I kept climbing. And then I was on the summit, snow coming sideways, and I didn’t care about any of it because of one thing: the air.

I notice it every time I leave New York City. The moment the city’s smog falls away and something clean takes its place, you feel it before you think it. But at 11,938 feet in early October with fresh snow and no one around, it was something else entirely. I stood there thinking: this is what significant feels like… Like I was a part of something that existed long before me and would exist long after.

That feeling, and the places that make it possible, is what this piece is about.

And it’s what’s now at risk.

What Happened on February 12

On February 12, 2026, the Trump administration and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin finalized the repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding: the scientific and legal cornerstone that, for sixteen years, required the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The Endangerment Finding wasn’t a regulation. It was the legal trigger for regulation. Think of it less like repealing one rule and more like removing the foundation of a building. In 2009, after an exhaustive review of the evidence, the EPA formally concluded that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. That conclusion created a legal obligation: act. Vehicle emissions standards. Power plant limits. Federal clean energy requirements. All of it rested on this single finding.

On February 12, the administration repealed that finding and simultaneously eliminated all greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles back to model year 2012. Power plant standards are next. The rule was published in the Federal Register on February 18 and takes effect April 20.

Zeldin called it “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” What he didn’t say: it makes the U.S. the only nation on earth that has formally decided greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health.

By withdrawing from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change earlier this year, the U.S. became the only country refusing to participate in global climate negotiations. Other nations are not following us. Many have reaffirmed or strengthened their own climate targets in direct response. We didn’t lead them somewhere new. We just left the room.

The Pattern

This didn’t happen in isolation. It’s worth naming what’s been assembled.

An oil billionaire installed as Interior Secretary. A former coal lobbyist running energy policy. A timber industry executive overseeing the Forest Service. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which produces independent science, disbanded. Career staff with decades of institutional knowledge forced out. The EPA’s environmental justice office gutted. Nearly $8 billion in clean energy funding canceled in October, before a judge ruled some of those terminations unlawful.

To justify the repeal, the administration commissioned a panel of academics known for challenging climate science, appointed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The panel’s report downplayed climate risks and questioned established evidence for global warming. More than 85 scientists submitted a formal critique. A federal judge ruled the panel had been illegally assembled out of public view. In its final ruling, the EPA quietly dropped the report as justification — a tacit acknowledgment it wouldn’t survive scrutiny — and relied instead on a novel legal argument: that Congress never authorized greenhouse gas regulation in the first place.

You don’t build that lineup for reform. You build it for a specific outcome. February 12 was that outcome.

The Places That Are Already Changing

Whether you ski or surf, hike or fish, hunt or run or simply think more clearly somewhere without a roof, this is about those places.

Western U.S. snowpack has declined 23% between 1955 and 2022, with losses at 93% of measured sites. That’s not a projection. It has already happened. Between 2000 and 2019, ski areas lost more than $5 billion in revenue directly attributable to climate change, through shorter seasons, fewer visits, and the rising cost of making artificial snow. Under a high-emissions future, the average ski season is projected to shorten by 27 to 62 days by the 2050s. In early February 2026, Arapahoe Basin, one of the highest-elevation ski areas in North America, had only 21% of its runs open.

The damage isn’t limited to winter. Longer wildfire seasons close trails, pour smoke into mountain valleys, and push air quality in outdoor towns to dangerous levels through late summer and fall. Altered precipitation changes the rivers anglers, kayakers, and rafters depend on. Warming oceans affect surf breaks, marine ecosystems, and coastlines that millions visit for the particular quality of attention only the ocean produces.

The outdoor world is not separate from the climate. It is the climate, expressed in snow depth, river flow, fire season, and the quality of the air at altitude.

That air. The thing I remember most clearly from the Middle Teton. The thing I notice every time I leave the city. It is not guaranteed. It is the product of a living atmospheric system that we are either tending or depleting, one policy decision at a time.

The Law, the Science, and the Fight Ahead

The administration’s legal argument is this: Congress, when it wrote the Clean Air Act in 1970, didn’t specifically authorize the EPA to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions, so the EPA doesn’t have the authority to do so. This relies on the “major questions doctrine,” a recent Supreme Court interpretation requiring agencies to have explicit congressional authorization for decisions of vast economic significance.

What this ignores is that the Supreme Court already considered and rejected a version of this argument. In Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007, the Court held that greenhouse gases are unambiguously air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and directed the EPA to determine whether they endanger public health. The EPA made that determination in 2009. The D.C. Circuit upheld it in 2012, finding it was “supported by substantial evidence” and not “arbitrary or capricious.”

The administration is betting a conservative Supreme Court will now reach a different conclusion. That bet may pay off. Harvard law professor Jody Freeman, Obama’s climate counsel, wrote this week that the repeal is “unlikely to survive legal challenge” but added the critical caveat: “regardless, we should be planning, developing, and building bipartisan support now for effective climate strategies that Congress and the states can take up when a window opens.”

The legal challenge is already filed. Within days of publication, a broad coalition including Earthjustice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit in the D.C. Circuit. California has announced it will sue separately. More cases are coming.

In a fast-track scenario: D.C. Circuit ruling by late 2026, Supreme Court by mid-2027. More realistically, this plays out over several years. In the meantime, the rule is in effect. Emissions limits are gone. The gap is real.

Make the Interiors More Exterior

There’s a phrase in architecture that has stayed with me: make the interiors more exterior. It means designing spaces that breathe like the outside, natural light, living materials, air that moves, views that go somewhere real. But it’s also a philosophy for how to live.

We spend roughly 90% of our lives indoors. For most of human history, that number was essentially zero. Research published this year in PLOS ONE found that spaces with natural light, plants, and living materials measurably reduce stress, restore attention, and elevate mood. Studies from hospital settings show biophilic design reduces patient recovery time and mortality. A Harvard study found occupants in green-certified buildings scored meaningfully higher on cognitive function tests.

The deeper effect is harder to measure. The more nature is present in how we live, not just visited on weekends but woven into daily life, the more we stay connected to what’s at stake. You can’t feel the stakes of snowpack decline without having skinned up a mountain on a warm January and felt something was wrong. You can’t feel the stakes of ocean warming without having surfed a break you’ve known for years and noticed it’s different.

People protect what they love. They love what they know. They know what they’ve experienced. The loop starts with going back outside.

Making the interiors more exterior keeps you tethered to what’s actually at stake. It keeps the abstract concrete. It makes you someone who acts, rather than someone who means to.

What You Can Do Right Now

The public comment period on this rule closed last September. That door is shut. The fight has moved to the courts, Congress, and the state and local level, which is where the most immediate leverage now lives.

Support the legal challenge. Earthjustice is leading the coalition lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit. The Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Conservation Law Foundation are all part of it. These cases cost money and take years. earthjustice.org · edf.org · nrdc.org

Contact your members of Congress. The administration’s argument is that Congress should decide climate policy. Fine, then tell Congress to decide. A phone call to your representative’s local office takes five minutes and gets logged. Write something in your own words, even two sentences. Find your representatives at congress.gov/members.

Pay attention to your state. California, New York, and a coalition of other states are moving to enforce their own greenhouse gas standards regardless of federal action. If your state hasn’t acted, your governor and state legislators are the right target. State-level pressure is often more tractable than federal.

Look at your local utility. Your electric utility decides each year whether to invest in new gas capacity or renewables. Renewables are now cheaper to build in almost every market, but utilities are political institutions and they respond to organized ratepayers. Find out who’s on your utility board. Show up.

Make the switch where you can. Rooftop solar pays back in 6 to 10 years in most U.S. markets. The federal Investment Tax Credit still applies but faces political uncertainty, so sooner is better. If you can’t install solar, community solar subscriptions often require no upfront cost. Green electricity plans are available in most states with retail choice.

Get involved with organizations that understand the outdoor stakes. Protect Our Winters builds political power from the ski, climb, and run community, focusing on down-ballot and state-level races. The Surfrider Foundation works on ocean and coastal issues. The Outdoor Alliance focuses on public lands. The fights that move outcomes are often local.

Go outside. Not as exercise. Not for content. Go to be there, with time and attention. The people who fight hardest for these places are always the people who know them most intimately.

I think about the Middle Teton often. Not the summit. The air. The specific, almost violent freshness of it at 12,000 feet with snow coming sideways and the whole range laid out below. The feeling of being, finally, completely, in the right place.

The mountain doesn’t care who the EPA administrator is. But it does require a functioning climate: snowpack that builds in winter, air that stays clean, temperatures that keep the couloirs frozen long enough to climb. Those things are not guaranteed. They are the product of choices made over decades, and choices being made right now.

The repeal of the Endangerment Finding is a serious blow. The legal fight is long. The gap between where federal policy sits and where physics requires us to be will have consequences we’re already beginning to measure.

But the clean energy transition has passed an economic tipping point that politics can slow and cannot reverse. The three cheapest electricity sources on earth are now onshore wind, solar, and new hydropower. 92.5% of all new electricity capacity added globally in 2024 came from renewables. The rest of the world is not following the U.S. off this cliff.

What is in question is whether we’re paying attention. Whether we stay connected to what’s at stake. Whether we make the interiors more exterior, weaving the outside into how we actually live, not just where we go on vacation.

The answer starts the same way it always does: getting back outside. Breathing the air. Remembering what it feels like when it’s right. And deciding that feeling is worth fighting for.

Sources: Federal Register, February 18, 2026 (Final Rule) · White & Case LLP legal analysis · Harvard Law / Yale Environment 360 (Freeman, 2026) · Nature, February 13, 2026 · IRENA Renewable Power Generation Costs 2024 · Scott & Steiger (2024), Current Issues in Tourism · EPA Western Snowpack Trend Analysis · CNBC, PBS NewsHour, World Resources Institute, Carbon Brief · PLOS ONE (2025) on biophilic design