Editor’s Letter

The 2024 presidential election in the United States unleashed unprecedented threats to the nation’s research and higher education infrastructure. The new Trump administration is dismantling agencies and ending federal funding for research on human health and the environment. Rather than advancing environmental sustainability—by mitigating human impacts on our planet’s ecosystems—this president and his enablers appear intent on just the opposite.

The Trump administration’s immigration policies also threaten the study and work visas that are essential to many students and faculty in landscape architecture and other STEM fields. The epistemological nihilism of this anti‐science president is appalling. Unsurprisingly, universities in Europe and elsewhere are actively recruiting scholars who currently work in the United States. Who could blame anyone for leaving?

Coalitions of professions are more important than ever in these unsettled political times. The Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN), for example, should be of interest to landscape scholars and educators. Through conferences, newsletters, and other publications, the STRN facilitates the transdisciplinary exchange of information across vibrant networks of European, North American, and Australasian scholars. These domestic and international networks provide opportunities for collaboration and collective problem‐solving.

Sustainability transitions research explicitly considers the policy contexts that influence human wellbeing across space and time. Public policies—at national, state, and local levels—often have lasting legacies that stay legible within the landscape. Understanding this social, political, and economic milieu is essential in formulating plans and implementing policies that promote environmental justice and stewardship.

Landscape Journal welcomes manuscripts that expand our knowledge of sustainability transitions at both the project site and larger landscape scales. This scholarship has the potential to advance evidence‐based planning, design, and land management practice. And it has the potential to empower advocacy initiatives that promote sustainability by countering disinformation and shaping better public policy.