A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
Prioritize protecting the environment.
An inhabitable planet for future generations.
In reneging on America’s commitment to the Paris climate accord, Trump walked away from the planet’s best hope of fighting global warming. Earth will continue to get hotter and sea levels will continue to rise, so that oil companies can continue to make money at the expense of the earth’s future. However, Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accord is also an example of how Americans can defy him and still do the right thing. Three hundred mayors and a dozen states have committed to continuing to combat climate change regardless of the country’s overall drift.
Of course it is not just Trump. As we have seen across the board, much of the harm being done is caused by this administration’s cabinet members, and agency chiefs, and Republican-controlled Congress. Trump’s pick to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a grievous example of the damage being done by stocking this administration with corporate stooges as Trump has done. They in turn fill the positions of bureaucracy beneath them with yet more corporate stooges and industry insiders, all the way down the line. Trump directed Pruitt to cut the EPA budget 40 percent, and roll back regulations on clean water protection and climate change prevention. Pruitt has worked to destroy everything the EPA has stood for and is turning it into a force that caters exclusively to business interests. Under Pruitt, a former lawyer who spent his career as an aggressive adversary of the environment—suing the EPA fourteen times in order to allow more pollution—the agency has halted its work to fight global warming and instead is moving to deregulate coal, power plants, oil, and pollution.
To put it bluntly, these swine want to poison the water and overheat the earth for money. Pruitt barred scientists in academia from being on the EPA board, instead filling it with industry insiders. To head the science advisory board, Pruitt installed a quack named Honeycutt, a Texas toxicologist who has spent his entire career arguing against every protection the EPA has ever put in place to help people; this is a guy who says pollution “isn’t that bad for people.” Honeycutt also said ozone standards made “no biological sense” because “most people spend more than 90% of their time indoors.” Yes, that is a real quote from the person currently advising the EPA on pollution.
With these kinds of people in charge, terrible and lasting damage is being done: the EPA is dismantling its Clean Power plan, the administration is green-lighting the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline, thousands of acres of national monuments have been sold off to oil companies, the Arctic and Atlantic oceans have been opened for more offshore drilling, and the EPA has canceled limits on the pollutants power plants can dump into water, so they can get away with dumping aluminum, arsenic, and mercury into streams, rivers, and lakes. They have replaced the very agency meant to protect the air with people who want to pollute the air to make cash for rich corporations.
What is frightening is that despite—or because of—the sheer volume of assaults this administration has launched upon the regulations put in place to protect animals and nature, much of it goes unnoticed. Consider the fate of the Pacific walrus. These beautiful animals are dying off because they cannot adapt to the rising temperatures of climate change, but the current administration has blocked a move to put them on the endangered species list. This walrus depends upon shelves of Arctic summer ice to breed and raise its young; at current rates, that ice will have melted away completely by 2030. Scientists have stated the administration’s move to block placing them on the endangered list is “a death sentence.” Sadly, the awareness of the plight of endangered animals must now be raised by people outside of the government. To quote Brett Hartl, a director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “Republicans in Congress continue to attack the Endangered Species Act despite overwhelming support from Americans of all political stripes. . . These attacks are designed to reward special interests that would plunder our natural resources even if it causes wildlife to go extinct.”
The clock is ticking. If Trump is kicked out of office by 2020, we can opt to stay in the Paris climate accord. That would be a wonderful first step toward doing what must be done to literally save the planet.
As I write, Texas is being devastated by flooding and hurricanes. The forests of the West Coast are suffering massive fires as temperatures continue to rise.
In Portland, Oregon, where I live, for days the sky was dark-ened by smoke from nearby forest fires, the air was thick and hard to breathe. I’ve worked as a forest firefighter, but to see this happening from my own front yard really brought home just how immediate all of this is. For days the sun was blood red and daylight was a haunted gray dusk. People came down with headaches and dry coughs as the sky rained down flakes of ash and soot, covering cars and sidewalks with a hellish version of snow. It feels apocalyptic because it is. The destruction of our world is happening right now before our very eyes. The fate of the world depends upon the battle between those who can see the truth and speak up for it, and those who want society to turn a blind eye to the damage that we as a species are doing to our planet.