Yet the president appears unmoved
The Guardian collects the ways Trump has trashed the environment.
“I want crystal clean water and air.”
That’s what Donald Trump said in the first chaotic presidential debate with Joe Biden.
It drives me crazy that he keeps putting it that way, because it shows how completely he doesn’t even get it. He hears “the environment” and he pictures a god damn glass of water. Water can be muddy and murky and be exactly right for its local environment. Environmental issues are not solely about what Donald Trump can safely put in his mouth; he can’t drink ocean water but humans sure as hell depend on that undrinkable water, as does much of the rest of life on the planet.
Experts agree that the climate crisis’s most destructive manifestations, on display in a particularly difficult year for the US, barely scratch the surface of the catastrophes to come. Yet the president appears unmoved by the enormous wildfires, devastating hurricanes, widespread water problems and persistent air pollution that disproportionately blights black and Latino communities. His administration has scrapped climate regulations, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards. Protections for public land and threatened species have been shrunk while new oil pipelines and coal mining have been encouraged.
Then they provide a very useful list.
Someone needs to drop him right in the middle of one of the currently raging wildfires, and refuse to come back for him until he signs everything he has to sign to get things to where they should have been without his interference.
He sees everything in absolute terms. “Crystal clear”, “the most”, “best ever”, “a record”, “never seen anything like it”, “the worst”. It’s such a child’s-eye view of the world.
As for water, that’s the stuff that comes out of a plastic bottle, right? Has he complained that radical socialist democrats want to take the plastic bottles away yet?
Trump’s son, Donald Jnr is into trophy hunting, big time apparently.
All trophy hunters, no matter how ‘conservationist’ they claim to be, go for the biggest and best trophies to mount on the wall of their den. Thus they cannot avoid acting as gene selectors, doing exactly the opposite of what nature, predators, and skilled animal breeders do. Where nature selects in the best and environmentally fittest, the trophy hunter selects precisely these specimens out.
The result can only be a slow and hardly perceptible genetic drift in each trophy-hunted species, and with results pretty well unpredictable, but potentially and with environmental change leading to catastrophic population collapse in these species down the track.
Omar, re.
This has already been seen in African elephant populations, and the drift is very perceptible. Because ivory poachers target the elephants with the largest tusks, and have done so on an almost-industrial scale, the smaller tuskers have had more breeding opportunities and as a result the average tusk size on adult bull elephants is a lot smaller than it was only a half-century ago. I recall reading that in some populations, a lot of the adolescent and younger adult elephants have barely any tusks at all.
I don’t think many people appreciate just how rapidly evolution can occur for some traits under the right selection pressure. Half a lifetime ago when I was in a different profession, a visiting academic from a university in the US corn belt presented data relating to a decades long run corn breeding experiment. A starting strain of corn had been selected to favour progeny with high protein over oil content. Then, on reaching high protein levels, the descendants were selected for oil content, then back to protein. It might have been around the other way, it’s a long time ago. Point is, it might be hard to select for some characteristics, but others are pretty easy.
Bill fish in NZ have got smaller since Zane Gray’s time. Commercial over fishing will be a large part of that, but so to was game fishing. I know since the 80’s there has been a trend to tag and release. It would be interesting to know if that has helped.
Rapid evolution frequently occurs with artificial selection. I would consider the elephant tusks and the size of bill fish to be artificial selection, because humans are selecting certain traits. Of course, they are going to find that they can’t get the big ones anymore, and it’s their own damn fault.
I agree with iknklast. This is artificial selection on an industrial scale, and it is having as massive an effect on species in the wild as artificial selection in agriculture, and on pet species such as domestic dogs; some varieties of which changed out of all recognition from being wolf-like in a surprisingly short amount of time.
Yes, these things are artificial selection, in the sense that but for human intervention, they would almost certainly not have happened that way. But this framing is ultimately unhelpful, as it separates humans from nature and subtly reinforces the absurd naive environmentalist notion that the biosphere *only* changes through human intervention and consequently the absurd naive environmentalist conclusion that we must restructure all of our activities to restore and then maintain the planet’s biosphere to some historical point, which will then last in perpetuity.
The fact is that human beings emerged from nature, and we are still a part of it. The disasters we cause are natural disasters, these days on the scale of major volcanic events, and very quickly verging on extraterrestrial ones. Our very presence in the biome cannot help but alter it; we have the gift of hard-won wisdom, as gained by experts such as iknklast, which can perhaps help us to guide our alterations more conscientiously and make sure that the planet remains habitable for us and for other complex life for the next handful of millions of years that we probably have before we’re due for some form of extinction.
But it is not all or nothing. The selection pressures we have introduced are novel, and we are seeing an extinction event approaching the scale of the ones induced by megavolcanism and cosmic impacts of eons past. We are fully in the Anthropocene now, and we must deal with that. There is no going back; there is only going forward, one way or another.
I’m not going to categorically deny that any environmentalists hold such views, but I sure as hell am not aware of anyone…
Really? I intend nothing of the sort. It is merely that human intervention will in fact lead to rapid changes, and yes, it is artificial in the sense that it is being deliberately manipulated rather than being a product of just ordinary processes occurring over a long period of time.
I wish I hadn’t. As an environmental scientist, I unfortunately encounter this all too often. Most environmental scientists don’t believe this (notice I said most; unfortunately, I met several in my doctorate program that believed exactly this). While most environmental scientists do not believe this, a startling number of environmental activists and lay people who don’t think about the environment much at all believe this. My students always insist that humans are not part of nature; they have been trained to think that, whether through the educational system or through media, I do not know. I have a special stack for books I threw across the room while reading for just that reason (though only one or two of them were literally thrown; most I just stop reading and consider it thrown across the room).
iknklast,
No, I did not intend (yes, yes, you all see what I did there) to specifically indict you as holding or promoting the ideas that I decry as “absurd naive environmentalism”, and nor do I intend to indict all environmentalism as either absurd or naive. My comment in fact exposes what I believe to be an unintended consequence of this framing of these concepts, which is why I bothered to publish it here in the first place.
Bjarte,
As iknklast says, this view is rarely held by environmental scientists, but is fairly common (if not explicitly considered) amongst well-meaning environmentally conscious urbanites, whose understanding of the biosphere seems founded upon the notion that the Earth was a steady state late Pleistocene interglacial temperate paradise from about four billion years ago up until around 1850 or so, when the second wave of the Industrial Revolution began digging up a shitload of coal and returning its carbon contents to the environment as quickly as could be managed.
I speak not of advocates or activists, nor even really of “slacktivists” who perform heroic feats of emotional labour on social media, but of the great mass of people amenable to the message of those advocates and activists and, ultimately, of the scientists whose understanding of the environment are our only real hope of managing the problems we are causing. I have encountered more of these people than I can reasonably account for, for decades now; they know that something is wrong, and humans are somehow responsible, but in a supernatural, almost religious way. Their intuitions seem to drive them to seek confession-style solutions, or to spend more money on products with green packaging and a meaningless label in an attempt to ameliorate their unease, as though it were some kind of repentance for the sins of humanity and capitalism.
But the damage we have wrought is not a supernatural sin. It is a natural disaster, comparable to a minor mantle plume eruption, which have happened fairly regularly over geologic timescales. Our appearance in the geologic record is an unexpected event, but it is not a supernatural intercession, and its consequences are also hardly supernatural: we have very good evidence for events similar in scope and destructiveness.
The selection pressures we have introduced are part of nature, and nature is reacting accordingly: there is nothing in the world, for example, that says an elephant absolutely must have large tusks, only the series of mutations and adaptations that had led elephants to develop large tusks before a new environmental pressure emerged which began selecting for smaller or non-existent tusks. Similarly for the size of fish and whales, or the balance of wild mammals versus livestock in the weight of biomass. That these and so many other outcomes are a result of human activity makes them no less natural, and that naturalness is more-or-less amoral.
I believe that if the average person understood this, viewed themselves as a part of nature rather than an imposition upon it, it would be easier to convince them that their choices in interacting with the rest of nature mattered. That “global warming” was not an abstract problem that rendered individual actions moot, but rather a result of all of our individual actions for the last couple of centuries. That solving it can be incremental and experimental. That, for example, we can reduce the impact of forest fires with competent forestry management and the strategic abandonment of high-risk zones, rather than continuing to build house after house and assuming that Elon Musk will magically get us off of fossil fuels.
In short, that we can make the hard decisions to guide our impact on the planet, unlike all of the other natural forces of which we are aware, but we cannot make that impact zero unless we cause ourselves to go extinct.
Seth, yes, I get all that, but science has a very specific concept of artificial selection, which does not mean it is not a part of nature, but that it is accelerated by human choices. So I stand by artificial selection, because that is what it is. Yes, we are part of nature, and I routinely make that point to my students, to their complete surprise. Many people think we are better than nature, above, transcendent (religious views, especially), while others seem to see us as some sort of unnatural intrusion on a perfectly balanced natural world. Neither of these views is true, but artificial selection still is an accelerated selection process driven by humans.
As for the belief in this perfect world, I found it embedded and nearly universal in the environmental philosophy department at my school. As a doctoral candidate in Environmental Science, I was required to take two graduate level philosophy courses, and most of the science students were horrified at the level of ignorance of the world these students…and the professional philosophers they read…possessed. They constantly dismissed science as a western imperialist endeavor, and refused to consider anything other than “eastern ideas good, western ideas bad”.
It’s a good thing I had exposure to philosophy before I arrived there, or I would have joined the rest of my science colleagues in dismissing philosophy altogether as an ignorant, silly field full of ignorant, silly people who parade around spouting big words and big ideas that have no actual reality behind them. I gritted my teeth and managed to sit through all the Vandana Shiva, geese feeling shame when they have sex, and dismissal of all science in order to get my degree. Now I read the philosophers I choose, and am a lot happier with the discipline than I would be if the “noble savage” and “western imperialist assholes” was all the philosophy I was ever exposed to.
iknklast #10, Seth #11
Hence the caveat about not categorically denying that any environmentalists hold such views. Some percentage of every group is always going to be cranks, right? I would have expected it to be a pretty fringe view though.
To be sure, I have encountered plenty of self-identified environmentalists who subscribed to what’s been called the “naturalistic fallacy” and hence wasted (in my view) an awful lot of time, attention and energy opposing and worrying about things like low levels of long wavelength electromagnetic radiation*, but I don’t think I have ever met anyone who literally thought that “the biosphere *only* changes through human intervention”. So how do these people explain the 5 mass extinction events that occurred before humans even existed? Never heard of those I guess (I thought the overwhelming majority of people had at the very least heard about the dinosaurs**). Sure, there are Young Earth Creationists (by definition in the “crank” category) who think that trilobites and dinosaurs co-existed with humans until Noah’s flood, but I wouldn’t expect to find many of those in the “environmentalist” camp.
What I do encounter on a daily basis (not from environmentalists admittedly) is some version of the argument that since change is inevitable anyway/has occurred naturally in the past etc., any change we’re observing now must be “natural” (as in “would be happening anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with us”) or at least nothing to worry about.
*Ironically some of these same people were very fond of sunbathing: If the electromagnetic radiation they worry about were a ping pong ball, the sunlight they actively seek out would be a cannonball. But the sunlight is “natural” (as, of course, is Amanita virosa), so nothing to worry about.
** Didn’t Steven Spielberg invent those?
I have heard a variety of “explanations”. Some people clearly are able to hold the idea of no change but human alongside knowledge of dramatic changes without getting headaches; they just pull out whichever fact fits the argument they are making at the time.
But other things I have heard, and seriously by serious people, unfortunately, include the fact that the extinctions didn’t actually happen. They believe the mass extinctions are an artifact of sampling, an example of an incomplete fossil record, and…I don’t know how they explain the dinosaurs. I usually check out when they get started, and go find someone I can actually talk to.
As an environmental scientist, I have had many people mansplaining me, womansplaining me, childsplaining me, and telling me why science should keep its goddamn hands off the environment, we are the sole reason it is messed up, and we have no right to even talk or think about it because…reasons. They are anti-scientific, anti-history (another western imperialist field, apparently), and anti-rationality. They believe rationality and reason, as well as evidence, are plots constructed by right wingers and imperialists to dismiss plain old common sense spoken by eastern cultures (many of which seem to have been put into their mouths by these activists).
I have been dismissed by one group of which I was a member; I didn’t have the requisite expertise to speak about environmental issues, apparently, because some of the things I said disagreed with what the pediatrician in the group said…and she has an M.D.! Much smart! Much clever! Much intellect!
Yeah, I could tell you horror stories. I probably should write a book about it, but I’m already depressed enough.
Oh, well
In a world of cargo cult science, cargo cult skepticism, and, more recently, cargo cult social justice movements, I suppose we were inevitably going to see cargo cult environmentalism as well. I suppose cargo cult versions of every good idea/cause/movement tend to evolve naturally for the simple reason that most people aren’t careful or analytical thinkers, but follow certain heuristics that react indiscriminately to certain external triggers. They’re like a fish that takes a lure because its heuristic doesn’t distinguish between “glittering thing that moves in the water” and “edible prey”, or a moth that flies into a candle flame because its heuristic doesn’t distinguish between “light in the dark” and “celestial object that can be used to maneuver by”.
iknklast:
There are quacks operating out there in every field, I suppose, including philosophy. But science is traditionally included in philosophy for a very good reason: strictly speaking, philosophy has no bounds, can be applied to anything open to critique and covers all knowledge by being itself the study of knowledge. Hence a chemist, physicist, historian or PoMo bullshitter will be awarded the degree Doctor of Philosophy by an academy as it sees fit.