TEARS ON EARTH DAY

We'll start standing up for Mother Earth, or she'll stop standing up for us

Digital Enhancement of NASA Image Credit: Roberto Machado Noa

The first time I noticed it, really noticed it, I was driving through New England. Weren’t the fall colors a bit less bright than usual? Then in Washington DC, I remember looking at trees near the Lincoln Memorial thinking, but wait, those are a sort of a brownish pea green aren’t they? Then the countryside in England, that was what clinched it for me. The glorious greens weren’t all that glorious anymore. I went from concerned to a bit terrified in the space of an instant.

All that I’ve read, all the data I have digested, and nothing hit me like seeing the colors fading. Damn, when they said the planet was sick … they weren’t kidding. It is sick, the way a person who’s sick starts to appear differently. And to think what this could mean….

So I had a dream. I didn’t really, but it feels like one. In my dream, it’s Earth Day and the whole world is waking up to the fact that the climate crisis is upon us. As everyone knows by now, it’s too late to actually stave it off. But my God we could mitigate. This is where a dream that unfortunately isn’t a dream comes in; it turns into a nightmare. The President of the United States is calling climate change a hoax and the Green New Deal a scam, his energy policy is centered around the idea of Drill Baby Drill, and his Director of the Environmental Protection Agency sees his main role as deregulating the fossil fuel industry, which means removing all environmental protections they can. In this, as in so many areas, the message of the Trump Administration to the Greedy Bastards Club is simply, “Have at it, boys.” After all, he told oil executives during his campaign that if they gave him a billion dollars he’d give them whatever they wanted. Even some of them balked!

I’m at a point in my life when I can say about a few things “I’m so old that I can remember….” And one of those things is the first Earth Day. It was all Birkenstock and big balloons and believe it or not, there was hope in the air. We were celebrating a green future, after all! And no one, I mean no one, foresaw the calamity that lay ahead. We could not have imagined the systematic destruction of humanity’s habitat that has by now become our new normal. We had no idea what resistance a deranged and amoral economic order would place before the harbingers of a more beautiful world. I mean, we did sorta. But we didn’t really.

It isn’t just the environment Those Boys are destroying. It’s the whole damn thing, of course; anything that gets in the way of the corporate matrix of economic sociopaths now given the keys to the kingdom by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

To anyone thinking, “Ah, if only the Democrats had won last year,” please do not. The conscious thinker does not let our side off the hook on this one, or on anything really. The Blues have to wake up to their own cultish behavior - the codependent relationship with the elite establishment that anointed Biden and then Kamala because they thought they knew better than to let the voters decide - or there will be zero chance of turning back the dark tide now washing over us. I know whereof I speak.

Joe Biden gave more fossil fuel permits to Big Oil than Donald Trump did in his first administration. Plus, he okayed the Willow Project. He did some great things too, don’t get me wrong - including allocating lots of money for green investment. But given the severity of the climate problem, it was still an incremental approach - and that kind of incrementalism was part of the problem. We needed more. We needed Big. We needed a President who would declare a climate emergency.

“But how would you do that?” people asked me. “You just do it!” I would say. That’s the power of the Presidency, which unfortunately Donald Trump has figured out. Declaring an emergency is the President’s prerogative. God knows the Republicans have abused their power, but the Democrats too often have underused ours. The Democrats used to be known for Big Things and that was our superpower. The New Deal. Social Security. The Voting Rights Act. Medicare and Medicaid. Those were not incremental measures. FDR, even Johnson, would be looked at today like wild-eyed Lefties, and not just by Republicans! That's how much we have let them define us.

Roosevelt knew that desperate times call for desperate measures, and anyone who has read anything - or even looked out the window, or read a weather forecast over the last few years - has realized the planet is in trouble. Climate scientists have all but shouted their lungs out trying to tell us. “It has become clear to me,” FDR said during the Great Depression, “that we must become radical for at least a generation.” And so must we. For these are environmentally desperate times. It’s not as though our poll-driven elite carefulness exactly staved off fascism. The fact that we didn’t go Radically Good is what opened the door to the Radically Bad.

And people would have gone for it; it’s the gatekeeper class, not Donald Trump, who put the lid on standing for the right thing. Voters like conviction; they like spine. Conviction is a force multiplier, and that’s why people like Trump. The only thing stronger than a liar with conviction is a truth-teller with conviction. That used to be the Democratic Party, and it needs to become that again.

It’s tough to take in the really, really bad news - the suffering of people or planet - if you’re so buffered by wealth and power that you know no matter what, you and your kids will be okay. Yet such people as that - not the scientists, and not the environmental activists - have been the main determiners of the environmental messaging of the Democratic party for years now. They have looked at those saying things like “CLIMATE EMERGENCY” as, well you know, kind of crazy. It’s not that they don’t want to save the planet; they just want to do so within the confines of obeisance to what they deem a necessary donor base.

Thus Democrats forewent what could have been the greatest political possibility of the last fifty years: America fundamentally taking the lead in saving the planet. The winning candidate in 2024 might have been someone saying they would declare a climate emergency in their first 100 days. I knew in my heart that if we made that case to the American people we could have enrolled them in a magnificent project. Ironically, the Democratic Party hasn’t asked people for too much over the last few decades; we have asked for too little. America was born of a Big Dream, and it’s in our DNA to keep pursuing it. I have traveled this country extensively for over 40 years. There’s a decency and intelligence there - yes, even nobility - we have not even begun to harness.

The gatekeepers resisted such boldness. And they weren’t just politicians, or political operatives, or the media; they were also the environmental figures and organizations that have chopped wood and carried water for the Democratic Party for years now. One thing you can say about the Right; their base holds their leaders accountable. On our side, the lack of free thinking over the last few years has been staggering. The cowardice of the environmental community, particularly, was stunning - including major environmental groups who in the final analysis were more scared of losing whatever political clout they had than of a looming global catastrophe. They wouldn’t even have a conversation with a candidate who wasn’t Biden or a Biden surrogate; too much of a risk. So don’t tell me everyone tried so hard. I know better.

The 2024 campaign is long over, but my team worked hard on creating our platform. The environmental agenda was particularly good, I think, and I include it here so anyone running in the future might help themselves to any ideas they like.

There will be more elections (please God), and one thing I know for sure is this: if Democrats continue to be politically mealy-mouthed, saying anything less than the absolute truth as we are given to understand it - about the environment or about anything else - then there will be no hope for our planet, our democracy, and very possibly our species.

I met a man on an elevator in DC a few weeks ago, and when I asked him where he was going he said he worked in the building for an Oil and Gas association of some kind. I said, “Well, I guess you guys are happy now!” He responded. “Well, it was okay before. The rhetoric was one thing, but basically he was okay.”

That’s a Washington DC conversation if I’ve ever heard one. We need to change that conversation and we need to change it fast. It’s Earth Day, after all. We’ll start standing up for Mother Earth now, or she will stop standing up for us.