America the Beautiful is more than a famed patriotic song; it is the name of a national environmental effort to “restore, connect, and conserve” 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. Sometimes called the 30×30 plan, it is part of an executive order that President Joe Biden signed on his first day in office.
“To date, much of what we do know about the administration’s plans comes from the environmental groups who invented this goal,” Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts wrote in opposition to the plan in a July 2021 statement. “While President Biden’s adoption of this goal may have been surprising to some, the concept is not new. The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, which first convened in 1992, had set a worldwide goal of conserving 17 percent of the world’s land by 2020 and recently set a new goal of 30 percent by 2030….