November 2018 begins a period Nick will later refer to as “not the happy times, to put it lightly.”
Trial had always seemed precarious. But when the Supreme Court told the lower court to go ahead in July, it seemed like the last hurdle had been cleared. A month ago, before the trial, Nick was looking forward to the days when scientists would finally testify, finally tell the courts about all the harm climate change had wrought—would still bring. It was what he had wanted all along.
Now, in retrospect it seemed like the government was working overtime to keep the trial in a theoretical phase, the one in which the case was just a judicial overreach by a bunch of well-meaning kids. That way, Nick says, the government could pretend the merits of the case were good, the spirit valid. It was the legal nuts and bolts that were objected to. This sought-after remediation plan? Simply not the best way to get it done.
“That kind of denies the real thing of, ‘This is going to drastically screw over future generations,’” Nick says on the phone, back in Colorado, in cooler climes, finally, but with trial canceled, life rearranged.
The government’s position strikes him as ironic. “This case is the only way to get it done because every other effort has failed, essentially.”
Still, the trial could resume anytime. So Nick begins the waiting, along with the rest of the plaintiffs.
———
The world turns through this waiting, but strangely. To the south, a caravan of refugees marches toward America’s southern border, its members propelled at times by crop shortages and slumping economies after a series of weather-related calamities and drought. In response, Trump calls on troops to defend the perimeter and issues campaign ads so full of hate and rhetoric that even Fox News takes a stand against airing them. On the campaign trail, Trump makes comments about terrorists and extremists lurking in the masses. He isn’t running for re-election, just control of the House and Senate by his party. He is running on the platform of hate and fear that seems to galvanize his base, though it sets another kind of American reeling, the kind that is turning out en masse to vote away the anxiety in the midterms.
They are Americans who want “the world’s greatest democracy” to still be that and who trust that by voting, they will set right what seems to have gone off the rails. But pining for an American ideal runs very far behind the despondency that is setting in for some of the young. So caught up in the daily polarization of it—the self-righteous defending of the guns and the identity politics, the mad rants on social media and the friending and the unfriending—many of the adults are missing the facts that Earth itself is destabilizing and that the youth are getting wide-eyed.
A few freshman congressional contenders see this and start saying the words “climate change” with something other than a tone of taking attendance, a ticking off of things in a rote roll call. The ears of the youth, they pique, turn. Something begins to shift.
Still, while people with jobs are sleeping in cars and medical bills are towering, swallowing whole families, at least one Canadian news outlet is forecasting an American civil war. It is hard for some to see that Earth is breaking down when our nation is breaking down so grandly, so radically, day by day in newscasts. As the hate intensifies, there is an attack on black shoppers at a Kentucky Kroger by a man who’d hoped to stage an assault on a black church but failed. Days earlier, another man had been arrested for sending pipe bombs to some of Trump’s favorite targets—people who’d criticized the president, including media—in south Florida, where the man had been living in a van plastered with Trumpobilia and hate speech.
It is all very distracting. And the headlines are fantastically good cover for the broad deregulation of environmental protections that is swiftly under way. When he is not lambasting his detractors on Twitter or the campaign trail, casually threatening wars, firing people, or lauding his own achievements as the leader of the free world, Trump is steeped in an effort to undo the rules that stand in the way of corporations. Despite the risk to youth, what it spells for an America the president will never see, his administration doubles down on moving the nation backward on ecological gains. Before November 2018, Trump had already rolled back protections for endangered species, signaled plans to pull out of the Paris Agreement, dropped climate change as a national security threat, cut the NASA Carbon Monitoring System, and cut climate and clean energy programs in a proposed budget. In the days after the almost-trial, his regime is rewinding fuel efficiency standards and promising to strip California of the ability to impose its own. It doesn’t matter that even the auto industry is against this, having been thrown into disorder by the sheer impulsiveness of it.
Ironically, the Environmental Protection Agency is leading the Trump administration’s assault on the environment. It’s been a year since the agency removed the informational page on climate change from its website, presumably for an update that never updated, prompting one former official to call it “the ghost page.” In between, the EPA has repealed Obama-era rules curbing methane and emissions from coal plants, and loosened regulations on air pollution from toxics—including benzene and asbestos. It has also disbanded its advisory panel on air pollution, approved the spraying of a pesticide (chlorpyrifos) scientists say causes brain damage in children, and tried to delay a public health report on deadly industrial chemicals (polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS) as they seeped into the water.
As November begins, the EPA’s press shop is being led by a Republican political consultant, and its staff is getting bare-knuckled with reporters, calling out alleged errors in press releases and blocking some members of the media from attending events. The president has already made his “enemy of the people” comments about the press and stripped CNN reporter Jim Acosta of press credentials for being bombastic. The EPA appears to be following suit, not only blocking reporters from attending things but also publicly calling one “a piece of trash” and another “an anti-Trump reporter” and “dishonest.” Suddenly even access to information about the environment demands loyalty. Hard to have when the EPA’s Region 4 director—former coal lobbyist Trey Glenn—is out of jail on bond for helping his former employer dodge a Superfund cleanup in Birmingham. In short order, the scandal-plagued Scott Pruitt, whose spendthrift ways are so lavish he’s managed to fritter away $43,000 on a phone booth, will be succeeded as EPA administrator by Andrew Wheeler, a coal and energy lobbyist and a notorious zealot for deregulation. As an interim director, Wheeler has already proposed rules to loosen carbon limits on power plants and change the way the EPA is calculating the benefits of air pollution standards.
This wholesale reversal of environmental ethos spreads beyond the EPA. Ryan Zinke, secretary of the interior, is among its proponents. In the early days of November, the Department of Justice is investigating whether Zinke enticed oil megacorp Halliburton to build him a brewery while the company lay in wait for Montana public lands to open for drilling. Also pending are more than a dozen other inquiries into Zinke’s exploits, including attempts to exempt Florida from offshore drilling rules, censoring a climate report, and killing a study on the health impacts of blowing the tops off mountains in Appalachia to mine coal. The Department of the Interior has already rolled back protections for water, wildlife, and air to make way for energy development and is offering more than 12 million acres of new federal land for lease. Soon, Marcy Rockman, who is charged with studying the effects of climate change on the nation’s parks, buildings, and archeological sites, will post her resignation from the National Park Service on Twitter, essentially telling the world that she is being starved of the resources to do her work. Somewhere in between, Steven Chancellor, the Indiana coal mogul who’d been tapped to advise Zinke on hunting, secures the permits to import lion heads into the States from Africa.
Elsewhere in the executive branch, the Forest Service is distracted from the business of managing the forests, battling instead “fresh revelations of rampant discrimination, bullying, retaliation and sexual misconduct,” according to the Associated Press, even as scientists discover that the last of the world’s wildernesses are disappearing and that America is one of five nations stewarding the bulk of them. FEMA’s maps, it is revealed, are years out of date and failing to account for sea level rise and extreme weather. The Departments of Energy and Agriculture are promoting the burning of trees and other biomass for energy, even as scientists warn the practice could be more damaging to the atmosphere than burning coal. And an analysis shows the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is failing to fine pipeline companies more than 90 percent of the time when pipelines explode or catch fire. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard is making changes in its still-failing efforts to contain a fourteen-year-old leak in the Taylor Energy oil well off the coast of Louisiana that dumps roughly 700 barrels of oil into the ocean every day.
———
Back in Louisiana, Jayden calls fellow plaintiff Miko on the phone to rant. She’s supposed to be at trial, supposed to be with the other plaintiffs in Oregon, but within a week she has been boomeranged back to the place she’d been battling in all along. Lately her mind is drifting to some not-so-good thoughts. Asked to describe them, the first word she utters is just “Oof.” She says she has a feeling of momentary hopelessness.
“I love the case, I love being part of the case, I love all the plaintiffs, and I love all the staff, but, like, come on,” she says. These fits and starts, she feels toyed with. “Having to have all this excitement just to go home empty-handed is something that would get everybody angry,” she says. “When I think about it, I’m just like, man, what is going on?”
It doesn’t make her lose hope. Not exactly. “But it kind of did put me a step down in a way,” she says.
It feels like the government is purposely stalling, purposely making the plaintiffs wait. As if “we need to go back to our place,” Jayden says. “It’s kind of showing that they don’t really care, you know? So yeah, I do kind of take that personal. Because you can’t even face twenty-one kids in court? How does that make you sound any type of good right now?”
She says she isn’t mad at everyone. Just rich people, mostly. The ones who put their money into destroying the things so many others need. The ones that invest in fracking. In drilling the Gulf. In making the extraction market so, so big that the damage belongs to everyone now.
———
As November inches on, politicians do as politicians do and make loud plans to fix it all in the last days before the general election. But even as oil companies dump millions into state races to fight carbon taxes and oil-and-gas zoning, there are signs that the environment is winning—with the people at least—as Americans step to the ballot box. Republicans in close races are talking climate change, for example in Florida, where congressional incumbent Carlos Curbelo floats a carbon tax proposal and state Republicans are torpedoing his Democratic challenger for taking “dirty coal money.” Governors’ races in some states also show a likely push toward local regulation of the very things the federal government is presently deregulating—like air quality. Some candidates are talking renewable energy mandates. And on the campaign trail, the language of the Green New Deal begins to foment, to take shape as more than a pipe dream while a contingent of Democratic up-and-comers urging radical spending on climate change look to be front-runners.
They win on November 6, and Democrats take control of the House. But to think that this changes much would be neoliberal, absurd. Party control by Democrats can slow but not halt the assault on Earth. It is the young—soon to stage a protest in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office—who can most clearly see what many older Americans cannot: that the problem of the collapsing planet needs more than this biennial commotion of voting for the people who might care. Or voting people out of office who don’t. Whether saving Earth is becoming synonymous with dragging politics to the left doesn’t matter. The work of doing so needs to stop falling second to simply winning, as if all that needs doing is cheering in some kind of biennial horse race. This national delusion that blue victories are enough is a diversion. The problem demands a focus on things our nation is not used to even seeing.
As if to make this point, the New York Times reports that week that Democrats have flipped twenty-nine seats in Congress, with average districts shifting 10 percentage points to the left—“the crest,” it posits, of a blue wave. In later print, though, the Times notes that the wave is only half the size of the red wave of 2010, during which districts shifted more than 19 percentage points to the right. In other words, the nation’s electorate is wresting control of itself from itself. The news that it has shuffled back across the ledger is really only that.
———
In the case, meanwhile, there is a brief flicker of hope. On November 2, both the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court finally deny the government’s applications to stay the trial, in effect paving the way for it to move forward once again. But on November 5, the day before the election, the Department of Justice files two more briefs in the Juliana case—one with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the other with the US District Court of Oregon. The first—another emergency petition—is aimed at killing the case yet again, the second at stalling it while this new request for dismissal is considered.
The legal team for the Juliana plaintiffs is exasperated. “It’s unheard of,” attorney Phil Gregory says in a statement. “I’ve asked colleagues, former Supreme Court law clerks, we’ve asked legal scholars, reporters who cover the courts, and no one has seen this before. It’s the clearest evidence of how fearful this administration is of standing trial in this case.” He says it’s the fourth time the government has made these arguments to the Ninth Circuit Court alone, and each time the plaintiffs have been made to wait. “It’s outrageous and shows such disrespect for the process.”
No bother. On November 8, the Ninth Circuit once again stays the trial. It seems the government’s attorneys can do this forever, as long as the courts will let them: ask the same questions over and over, and use the upper courts to pressure the lower ones, meanwhile avoiding a trial. But the courts are the courts. Procedural. Careful. Any claim of misstep, of error, is carefully assessed instead of treated as a symptom of what it is becoming: obstruction. I send the news to my Reuters editor, who cheekily dubs it another episode in the legal soap opera that has replaced our courtroom thriller. “As the World Burns,” he calls it. In the sick way that gallows humor staves off frustration, we laugh. What else is there?
Later that day, though, the world does burn, and the joke is no longer funny. Not one but two major wildfires erupt in California, killing scores, decimating a small town and celebrity mansions alike, burning buildings to ash and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Drought conditions had been an issue, the unceasing heat an invitation to tinder, but despite such signs that wildfires are worsening, no word of a trial comes.
While observers of the Juliana case wait for things to go back to normal or settle into a new one, the City Club of Eugene hosts a panel discussion about what to expect next. There is, of course, nothing to expect. But conjecture is still healthy for supporters, who by then have such a case of whiplash over the trial starts and stops that about 150 of them turn up looking for clarity or just a few more kernels of news to egg on their fanship.
One woman shows up in a baseball shirt emblazoned with “Trial of the Century.” A man notes on his name tag that he has “arrived by bicycle.” People do what they can.
———
Alex, like Avery, saves his anger for himself. Back in New York, he is disillusioned, annoyed at having gotten his hopes up for trial.
Kiran is back at college, too, and trying not to worry about what happens next. There is still one semester left. But this is the last semester that really matters, Kiran having arranged the spring around playful electives to ease the transition to slackerdom. Worries are, for now, dancing on the other side of an anxiety wall in the push toward winter finals, a wall that will fall in another month.
Meanwhile Aji Piper, also in Seattle, is wrestling with the pretrial image of himself. Scholastically out of the box for roughly half a year, Aji ended his high school career in the spring of 2018, not having received a diploma. Having endured the pretrial coverage typecast as “a high school dropout,” however, he is disgusted with this image of himself and resolves to reenroll for the one last hideous semester.
Levi, ever the optimist, concentrates on keeping his room clean. It is not usually this way—clean—but he was tasked with scrubbing it before he left for trial, and after returning to Florida finds that he likes it.
“It was actually kind of nice to . . . be able to keep it that way for a while,” he says. And he enjoys focusing on this tidiness, on exerting control over his own dominion.
It was upsetting to have the trial canceled, he says. And to have to do things like turn up at the pet sitter’s to pick up his hermit crab early and explain to the people from church—the ones who had only just thrown him a going-away party—why he was home again, especially to those who were not so acquainted with the Internet. The time he had with his co-plaintiffs, without the courtroom, without the drama—he remembers those parts well. The mushroom festival and the hangouts. And he is glad for all the people who showed up to rally who had never been plaintiffs but were as upset as plaintiffs anyway.
His feelings toward his government when the trial got canceled, though, were not so positive.
“It just felt like they didn’t care about us enough to let us have a trial.”
———
As the month wears on and the waiting continues, bad news about the state of the natural world rains down in a cascade. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) delivers the news that people have wiped out 60 percent of the animals on the planet since the 1970s. And as if the coral reefs aren’t having a rough enough go of it, scientists learn they are starving for nitrogen off islands where rats have infiltrated, the rats having eaten the birds and island bird poop being, it turns out, a mainstay of nitrogen supply for coral reefs.
Elsewhere the rats, like the raccoons, are proliferating in the heat, and scientists at Cornell University warn of a ratpocalypse. Rats can breed within a month of being born and have a gestational period of fourteen days, meaning a rat can be a grandparent by the time it is three months old. The higher temperatures are spelling fertile breeding, and scientists predict cities could be overrun by rats as the world gets warmer. The implied caution is that not all of the rats will be Disney rats, famous chefs like Remy in Ratatouille or good with wardrobe like the rats in Cinderella. Instead, rats can be prolific carriers of disease. In a roundup of rat news, the Boston Globe further reports they are playing in puddles by the dozen in Boston, and tenants in a public housing project in New York say the rats are getting bigger and have lost their fear of humans.
In this way, it seems the animals are either winning or losing in the climate fight, mostly losing.
In the losers column, Atlantic waters are getting so warm that shellfish are on the decline, prompting experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict that the futures of scallops, quahogs, softshell clams, and eastern oysters lie in farming. That outlook seems optimistic, though, after farmed oysters in Florida, already pummeled by Hurricane Michael, are then made central to a water war. Also, heat waves are causing infertility in male insects. The butterflies are having a difficult run, too, with warmer temperatures upsetting migration and plants, while habitat for more than a hundred species at the National Butterfly Center lies in the unfortunate path of Trump’s sought-after border wall. The possible fate of butterflies? Cast to farther-flung lands or, worse, immortalized in glass frames and hipster tattoos. The Bureau of Land Management is selling off the habitat of threatened sage grouse. And an insidious wasting disease is infecting deer and elk in Wisconsin.
It is hard to define the situation with the shorebirds. Plovers and sandpipers and the like, about half of which are already in decline, are fending off a threefold increase in nest robbing by Arctic foxes and weasels and such, likely because global warming is making eggs a best-bet for food and thinning grasses make it easier to find them. Many of the affected birds are cute and fuzzy, with offspring that make for greeting cards with grammatically mangled salutations like “Seas the Day” and quotes from Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Reading it all, my eyes are killing me.
———
On November 21, three weeks after trial was canceled, Judge Aiken certifies Juliana v. United States for interlocutory appeal, inviting the Ninth Circuit Court to inspect the case, halt it if it wants to. It’s a dare, it seems: You want the case? Take it. As she does this, Aiken writes that she thinks Juliana is better off in a trial court. Her trial court. But she asks the Ninth Circuit to have a look at the case if it wants to. Observers will later note that Aiken seems to have been pressured to do this. That in its first denial of the government’s petition in July, the Supreme Court justices had hinted in unsubtle ways that the case ought not to go to trial, given that “the breadth” of the plaintiffs’ claims was striking and presented “substantial grounds for difference of opinion.” They had urged Aiken’s court to take the government’s concerns about “the burdens of discovery and trial” into account.
Aiken had let the case go forward despite this language. But subsequent rulings from the Supreme Court and also the Ninth Circuit Court seemed to urge her to let the Ninth Circuit judges intervene.
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, will eventually dissect all of this in an essay for the Harvard Law Review. He will put it this way: “In a superficial sense, the government ‘lost’ its requests for emergency and extraordinary relief in Juliana. . . . But . . . still nudged the lower courts to provide much of the relief the government had sought.”
The day of Aiken’s ruling, however, following what is now a typical Trumpian rant about the Ninth Circuit and “Clinton judges,” Chief Justice Roberts takes the rare step of firing off some choice words at a speech. He says there are no Clinton judges, no Bush judges, just judges. But despite this assertion of judicial independence, observers like Vladeck will conclude that the court has been bending to the administration’s tactics while it caters to all these “emergencies.” The plaintiffs’ attorneys are still watching several other cases, watching the Department of Justice run roughshod over the courts with the same unprecedented calls for relief: still targeting the ban on military service for transgendered people, the rights of young Dreamers to remain in America, and a citizenship question on the US Census.
That night, I watch a three-part dystopian Western called Young Ones, in which Michael Shannon stars as a besieged family man who defends a muddy well, a job, and his children in times of epic drought. The world is a dust bowl and there are Spaghetti-style close-ups against barren, useless landscapes. Between scenes, the camera pans quickly across sand. Against this desolate backdrop, people are somehow still driving. They drink water from gasoline pumps, and the lure of the land is a man who hawks machines at auction, drawing its sparse inhabitants, zombielike, by calling for bidders over the airwaves.
———
Around this time, my husband and I pass a night with two friends who have returned to America from India not long before. They are next headed to Canada, unwilling to wait for whatever comes next in our nation’s continuing dissolution. Our friend has just written a book about Silicon Valley, one that uncovered surprising connections between the valley’s elite and the rebirth of white supremacy in America. A few days before in Oregon, the state’s leading newspaper had run an editorial sympathizing with a Patriot Prayer patriarch who’d been using our community as a performance space for a nativist agenda. My friend was the only journalist in the state to speak out against this pandering. He is worried about what that means.
The coffee table is lined with prescription bottles. He says the landlord doesn’t allow pets, but he and his wife have a letter from their therapist endorsing their kitten, who they pass the hours teasing with a string on a stick. In a few days, they will load the cat into a U-Haul and be off to Edmonton, where they fear the cold and the tar-sand politics but feel safe, at least, from what they increasingly view as the impending civil war the Canadian press has predicted. People sleep in the streets. The richest among us control a government that is gutting public services, calling them entitlements. And so many guns, many in the hands of people who seem increasingly willing to use them against those who do not agree with their views or look like them. Now this: the courts are breaking.
We talk long and mostly drink while I shop from their cast-off clothes. The later it gets, the more paranoid we all sound. Talk to any investigative journalist, my friend says, and you’ll start to wonder if they’re off their meds. Another colleague is writing a book about plastics, and all she can talk about is how we are all slowly becoming plastic. How scientists have found microplastics in people’s bodies, in their excrement.
It is a race to what will kill us first, it seems: the violence we are careening toward, our garbage, or our dying planet. Days later, when scientists posit that an elongated object found in space might be an alien spacecraft, my friend shares the news on Facebook, delighted. “Help is on the way!” he writes.
———
I soon take a walk in the woods with Isaac and Miko Vergun, siblings and Juliana plaintiffs, the only sibling duo in the case. Isaac is sixteen and, on most days, a study in fashion. The clean lines of his suits, sharp collars, and the glint of his glasses bespeak a precision of dress and a certain whimsy too. Bright colors. No fear of patterns. Today he turns up in a beige pullover over a safari-style button-down, the front decorated with embroidered critters. There’s a bird with a watering can with a heart on it, watering a daisy in a plaid pot; a chicken with a blank expression; a spade with garden gloves; and a garden stake with radishes on it. He is wearing checkered shoes.
Isaac knows there are solutions to climate breakdown. And he’s made a certain peace with humanity’s slow course in finding them. While we talk, he tells me he expects to live in an apocalyptic world someday. “Probably when we’re like thirty or so, it’s going to get kind of bad,” he says. “But like at that point, hopefully, people can put aside their money interests and then realize that we’re actually in a bad situation and then all work together. I’m obviously trying to make that happen sooner.”
Isaac says this with no anxiety, no bitterness. Just the calm, matter-of-fact way of a person saying what’s so. He thinks there will be more smog, more fire, more hurricanes until people are motivated to turn back.