It was an exhausting week in Donald Trump World. So many outrages, so little time!
The political universe now seems (understandably) fascinated with one of the 45th American president’s latest lunacies, his determination to – somehow – pin the demise by suicide of sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein on some sort of conspiracy engineered by the notorious and nefarious Bill and Hillary Clinton, otherwise known as the 42nd American president and his wife.
Then the political lens took a slight detour to focus on the arrogance of new Trump immigration czar Ken Cuccinelli, who late last week decided to rewrite the moving Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty that has inspired people around the world for more than a century. Ken’s somewhat less poetic version, at least as I understand it:
“Don’t send me any tired, poor huddled masses.
They can breathe – or not – elsewhere.
The wretched refuse, homeless and tempest-tossed are free
To teem on any shore they want as long as it’s not ours.
Send instead those with advanced degrees and golden bank accounts
Who are yearning to invest on our fortified shore.”
Yeah, the meter’s off, but that’s not all that’s amiss. While we’re all tut-tutting at the petty malice of Donald Trump, we’re missing the deep damage to our country being done in his name, whether with or without his actual knowledge. Such as the destruction of more than 50 years of legislation that has materially advanced the health, welfare and prosperity of ordinary Americans.
Latest target in his sights? Turns out our self-proclaimed “great environmentalist” president’s latest Big Idea is to gut the overwhelmingly popular Endangered Species Act (pushed and proudly signed by Richard Nixon, who was – despite his other sins – a real environmentalist).
Now, if there is anything that has been true since Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World, it is that successive waves of explorers, adventurers and settlers not only exploited and sometimes murdered the land’s indigenous inhabitants but heedlessly and quite deliberately despoiled and even destroyed the continent’s abundant wildlife for food or profit or often for just fun.
Many animals were under serious siege for years, but the poster critter for the dangers of unfettered species exploitation is the passenger pigeon. Or, rather, was the passenger pigeon, a North American species once considered the continent’s most abundant bird, numbering in the many millions.
The birds traveled and roosted in gigantic groups, often darkening the landscape as they flew low overhead. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, enormous flocks could block out the sun for hours. And they were prized for their meat and their feathers.
But because they moved and roosted in such gargantuan numbers, they were easy to kill. There were so many, people thought, they could never be wiped out, and so they were hunted and slaughtered unceasingly, thousands at a time, as “civilization” moved west.
Passenger pigeons were gone from the wilds by the early 1900s, and 105 years ago, in 1914, Martha, the last bird in captivity, died at the Cincinnati zoo. She had never had a fertile egg.
This irrevocable eradication of an entire species from the planet was an early impetus for the creation of laws to protect wildlife. Another was the near loss of the American bison. Millions once roamed the prairie in thundering herds but by 1889 wanton mass killing had reduced their number to fewer than 1,000 – and a large number of those were in captivity.
Today, thanks to conservation and breeding programs there are said to be about 500,000. And, of course, we saved the celebrated American Eagle by banning DDT in 1963, when its numbers were down to 487 nesting pairs. By 2007, there were nearly 10,000.
But, politically, Americans move slowly, and it took the passage of more than half a century, two world wars and a major depression for the conservation ethos to take thorough root.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Congress passed and President Nixon signed a constellation of wide-ranging conservation laws. They included the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and – drumroll here! – the Endangered Species Act.
The laws have been under assault by various special interests ever since, but they’ve all endured more or less broadly intact and earned much public appreciation to become the bedrock supports for a whole universe of laudable reforms. Until now.
Now comes Trump in the person of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt – a former lobbyist for timber and mining companies as well as for gas and oil interests – to propose helpful “improvements… to increase effectiveness and transparency” in the way the law is applied.
But Lisa Friedman, a longtime reporter on climate policy and related issues for the New York Times, describes how the “improvements” are a bold attack on existing law. The proposal would significantly weaken the basic law and make it more difficult to protect wildlife from climate changes.
As she summarizes things, the new rules “would make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and weaken protections for threatened species, the classification one step below endangered.” And regulators would be allowed, for the first time, to take economics into account – for example, will revenue be lost if a species deserves protection? Is it worth it?
“Critically,” she writes, “the changes would also make it more difficult for regulators to factor in the effects of climate change on wildlife when making those decisions because those threats tend to be decades away, not immediate.”
Friedman concludes that “overall, the revised rules appear very likely to clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live.”
A host of conservation organizations agree with her.
Bernhardt is Trump’s guy, reflecting the contempt Trump – who, I suspect, had never got closer to real wildlife than maybe encountering an errant field mouse darting across one of his prize golf courses – seems to have for the real natural fauna of our country.
And so the ordinary American should ask – repeatedly – why, why, why is it seemingly the instinct of Donald Trump and his acolytes to destroy the real America he’s sworn to cherish and protect?