Averting Planet Trump

There is something perverse and peevish about the anti-environmental movement that current US president Donald Trump exemplifies. Yet if there is anything we can learn from environmental history, it is that willful ignorance and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality is not unique in history.

Consider, for example, the sort of arrogance that led the Times of London to proclaim, in 1854, that it would “prefer to take our chance of cholera … than be bullied into health.” Other famous examples include: denial of the germ theory of disease in the mid- to late-19th century; resistance to mosquito control at the start of the US Panama Canal project in 1904; acceptance of deadly leaded gasoline in 1926; denials that tobacco caused cancer in the 1960s; and objections to reducing ozone-depleting CFC refrigerants in the 1980s.

So it’s not just our president and his minions, and it’s not just the climate change issue. Trump has amplified a self-destructive tendency that lurks in human nature and affects many issues.

This week, a New York Times editorial entitled “Trump Imperils the Planet” explained that in terms of endangered species and climate change, the Trump administration “is taking the country, and the world, backward.” For the stout of heart, the Times provides a long, depressing list of environmental standards that are being rolled back, not just in the US, but in many other countries as well, following the American lead.

Central to Trump’s thinking – or lack thereof – is the notion that sustainability is not compatible with economic growth. Nothing could be more naive or short-sighted, of course, but even if others see him cutting a figura ridicola, Trump’s brazen arrogance shows he is determined to carry through to the end. And what an end.

Consider Planet Trump, year 2100. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision just how lifeless earth could become in less than a century. If we do not act soon, we will get Planet Trump instead of the great blue earth; we have dead seas and not living oceans; we have silent springs rather than flocks of birds; we have a dead world, a world that is no longer home.

We only have a short time to stop Planet Trump if this world is going to survive in any recognizable form. To be clear, the struggle ahead is one that must use the more powerful force of persuasion and non-violent resistance. No one should dream that any real change will come from the barrel of a gun. That, too, would be a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the reality of our precarious situation.