Ed Russo: Trump's environmental hero-maker, at my table at the Nobel Sustainability Trust — and a man the Trust can work with

Who this is

In Jonathan Hare's account. At his table at the Nobel Sustainability Trust summit in November 2024 — the San Francisco summit, held with UC Berkeley, two weeks after the election — was Ed Russo, whom Hare described to Jeff Weiss a year later (S-141) as 'a legit environmentalist' who had nonetheless 'wrote some books saying that Trump is an environmental hero, because that's how you get close to Trump.' Hare's reading of the method was approving rather than cynical: the way to make it resonate for Trump is not climate but people — 'if you take care of people, poor people in like Africa and South America, they won't migrate here.' On 31 August 2026 Hare asked for this page and gave its purpose (S-186): Ed is somebody the Consilient Nature and Humanity Trust can work with — 'he would love it.'

Miami, December 2025 — documented. At the Trust's 2025 summit, 5 December at the St. Regis Bal Harbour, Russo — 'recipient of the Special Recognition in Biodiversity Medal' — delivered a keynote on behalf of the President of the United States and received the Trust's official recognition, on a program that also carried Peter Nobel, Johan Rockström, Andrew Young, the Trust's academic partnership with Cambridge, and an AECOM smart-city certificate for Lusail. Hare, eleven days later, called it the Nobel Sustainability Award (S-141); the Trust's own name for it governs on display. The next summit is planned for Doha.

The public record, at web grade. A 1979 landfill fire in Morris County, New Jersey, turned Russo from entrepreneur into environmentalist: he founded Help Avoid a Landfill Tragedy, the site became a Superfund site, and he went on to preside over Chester Township's council. He was environmental consultant to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization for more than two decades — habitats around golf courses is how it began — and in 2016 self-published Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero. In February 2025 WLRN profiled him as the newly appointed chair of a federal environmental advisory task force making suggestions directly to the President: clean air, clean water, 'all of the above' on energy, carbon capture and desalination unstuck from regulation, and 'MAGA is Make America Green Again.' He is co-founder and chief executive of RussKap Water, which makes atmospheric water generators for, among others, the Department of Defense; in Key West he is president of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, on the board of Reef Relief, and on Monroe County's climate advisory committee.

Why he is here. The Trust's settlement flows to nature and humanity regardless of who holds office; Russo is the rare figure who sits inside the current administration's environmental apparatus and inside the Nobel sustainability network at once, and who speaks the language — people first, habitat in perpetuity — that the record's Sustainable Markets work already speaks. This page carries Hare's candid characterization of him under the record's transparency rule; Russo's own account, or his objection, supersedes it.

Where this intersects the work

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Where this came from

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What this bears on

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What is missing, and how to fix it

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• Hare's account of what was said at the table
• Russo's own account, or his objection to anything here