The video snippets didn’t look like much—some silvery fish shimmying upstream—but I knew the backstory, so the images were charged with inspiration. In late October, my social media feed was packed with Chinook salmon spawning in the upper reaches of Oregon’s Klamath River watershed. It was the first time such a thing had happened in more than a century. In just the last year, a choke chain of dams on the Klamath were torn down as part of the largest river restoration in US history. Within weeks of the final dam removal, the salmon came back. As Juliet Grable writes in “A River Reconnected,” their speedy return is “an astounding reminder of nature’s resiliency when given half a chance.”

The salmon comeback took on new meaning for me in the aftermath of the election. Donald Trump’s victory felt like a punch to the solar plexus. During the past four years, we’ve seen ambitious—if incomplete—presidential leadership on climate change and lands conservation. Trump’s return to the White House will mean four years of battles to defend the progress we’ve made and the places we love.

As I took in the election results, platitudes about “the long arc of the moral universe” sounded threadbare and careworn. The Chinook on the Klamath felt different. They were more than rhetoric; they were reality. The salmon reappearance was evidence of the potential for rewilding and restoration. The decades-long campaign by environmentalists and Native nations to bring the salmon home was proof of the power of resistance.

Resistance takes many forms. It seems likely that opposition to Trump 2.0 will look much different than it did in Trump’s first term. This time, the resistance may be characterized by long-term, hyperlocal, cross-class organizing that ditches the old markers of left and right. I have always believed that a passion for wild nature transcends political labels. Americans’ desire to preserve this country’s natural heritage isn’t transpartisan so much as it’s prepartisan: An affinity for nature comes before ideological identity. Now more than ever, those of us who care about protecting wildlands and climate stability must find common cause with people who don’t call themselves environmentalists but still share that passion—even when we disagree on much else.

We must also be clear-eyed that Trump is no friend of the environment—nor are the tech oligarchs and oil tycoons who helped propel him to victory. During his campaign, Trump dismissed global warming as “not our problem” and said rising sea levels mean “more beachfront property.” He slandered the historic climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act as the “Green New Scam.” He promised to “frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill.”

We should take Trump at his word. As Adam Federman reports in “A Slippery Slope,” oil corporations are eager for a drilling boom in the Alaskan Arctic, and Trump has pledged to fulfill their greasy aspirations. Meanwhile, as Delaney Nolan reports in “Gaslands,” advocates on the Gulf Coast are struggling against a raft of current and proposed fracked-gas export terminals. You can bet that Trump will try to fast-track gas exports, which would be an act of climate vandalism.

It will require a whole lot of grit to thwart the incoming administration’s oil-soaked agenda. Reminds me of something the ever-wise Rebecca Solnit wrote after the election: “There is no alternative to persevering.” The Klamath salmon persevered. So did their human allies who have been working to revive the river, like the tribal folks out casting seeds across what used to be lake bottom.

Every seed is an act of hope, fertilized with dedication. In these darkest days of the year, take a moment to remember: Resistance is fertile.