Earth Day Then And, Sadly, Now
The first Earth Day, fifty years ago on April 22 hoisted a bright flag of newly awakening concern for the continued beauty of America and the health of us all, signifying a breakthrough to a better era.
President Nixon’s U.S. Commissioner of Education, Sidney P. Marland Jr., affirmed this when in 1971 he wrote, “It is now quite clear that the American people are determined to make the 1970s the Environmental Decade. In two State of the Union addresses and two special messages on the State of the Environment, President Nixon has made what he called a ‘national commitment’ to environmental enhancement and improvement.”
The most distressing Earth Day — if you don’t count this one — was a decade ago when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well blew out at the very end of the drilling process due to a combination of human failures that included: rushing to save money, using cement that had failed tests, a series of reckless management decisions at the drilling rig during indications of a serious problem, and a technical flaw in the valve that was supposed to prevent a blow-out. Oil gushed from the seafloor into the Gulf of Mexico for months. Consequently, President Obama’s administration required new safety procedures.
But now Donald Trump, systematically undoing most of what President Obama accomplished for health, safety, and our environment, is undoing protections put in place after BP’s Deepwater Horizon well blew out. This, despite the fact that a decade later wildlife and humans of the region continue to suffer increased cancers and other illnesses due to prolonged exposure to oil and fumes a decade ago.
As a candidate, Donald Trump said, “Department of Environmental Protection; we are going to get rid of it in almost every form.” But that was an understatement. He didn’t just mean the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump has sought to weaken the beams of the entire framing of U.S. environmental protections.
When Republican President Richard Nixon signed the laws protecting public health and America’s natural beauty — laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and others — the issue was such bipartisan no-brainer that each party sought to out-do the other in showing how much they cared about our environment. Together the major parties made America the greatest nation in the world for environmental quality.
That was then. Trump’s hundred-or-so anti-environmental rollbacks — rollbacks of public health policies, loosening controls on toxic chemicals and pesticides, hiding studies on toxic chemicals, undoing protections for forests, weakening Endangered Species Act protections, and Trump’s general war on public health and environmental safety — are summarized in detailed, well-cited articles in The New York Times, Wikipedia, and National Geographic. Here are just some of the low-lights of where we are this Earth Day, how far we’ve fallen, how much we are losing. What’s at stake.
Trump has proposed devastating budget cuts of about one-third to EPA, including cuts of over 70 percent to its Environmental Justice wing, and 94 percent cuts to programs that support basic drinking water and sanitation infrastructure for rural and low-income communities, which are EPA’s programs that most directly focused on the health of people of color, low-income people, and Native Americans.
After Trump’s first EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned under a cloud of his own arrogant making, Trump found Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist. Wheeler has undone President Obama’s emissions limits from coal plants and automobiles, repealed President Obama’s methane emission rules, terminated a scientific review panel that had advised EPA on air pollution — and weakened the agency’s criminal enforcement arm (causing enforcement to did to a 30-year low). Reductions in mercury emissions under President Obama had translated into less mercury in fish. Trump’s weakening of mercury emission rules will mean more mercury in our seafood. Meanwhile Trump’s Interior secretary, long involved in exploiting our public lands, is now “ripping apart” public lands protections, weakening water protections on Native American lands to favor fracking for gas, and seeking to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
Trump’s people have been pushing Keystone and other pipelines, in part by undoing the states’ rights to block federal plans that threaten to contaminate water. A White House spokesman said that a related permit issued by Trump “is indeed an exercise of presidential authority that is not subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act,” something environmentalists point out is illegal. Trump’s administration has worked to allow seismic airgun exploration for oil off the East Coast — which has never been allowed there due to its potential to kill marine mammals and other ocean wildlife. And they issued drilling permits for the Arctic Ocean, where a serious spill or blowout would be essentially impossible to deal with. Legal challenges have successfully blocked both the East Coast and Arctic drilling.
After President Obama’s administration concluded a multi-year review of the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska by determining that the mine was much too risky to be permitted because it would poison the vast Bristol Bay watershed and it threatens to destroy the largest, most commercially valuable salmon runs remaining on Earth, Trump’s people have been pushing the project. To further aid oil and gas at the price of destroying land and habitat, Trump’s administration undid the 2015 Sage Grouse Conservation Plans, which had been put together by stakeholders ranging from industry to conservation groups. This affects not just the threatened grouse themselves (down 97 percent from original numbers), but eight million acres. Trump did sign a popular bill giving various protections to 2.3 million acres, but in all he has trampled far more than he’s helped.
Trump’s people also started up the chainsaws again against the remaining ancient trees of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest — and ordered an overall 31 percent increase in tree-felling nationally on Forest Service land (and threatened to withhold FEMA funding from California unless the state cut more trees, a threat that appears illegal). He undid Obama designations for parts of Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and several undersea National Monuments (while dismissing data showing the public benefits of those designations).
For animals and plants generally, Trump’s administration weakened implementation of the U. S. Endangered Species Act, the world’s best and most effective law for preventing permanent extinctions. And for the first time in over a century, if birds are in the way it’s OK to kill them “incidentally.”
Of course there is good news: The Interior secretary placed a 20 year ban on mining near Yellowstone National Park. And Trump signed a law to work to prevent plastic from entering the ocean from other countries (but weakened a policy about selling drinks in plastic bottles in U. S. National Parks that had cut down on littering).
The Trump people don’t acknowledge that climate change is happening, so they cut NASA’s climate monitoring. It’s easier to believe what isn’t true when you have less information about what is true.
Trump repealed President Obama’s Clean Water Rule and has generally weakened clean water and wetland protections, including revoking a rule that had prevented mining companies from dumping mining waste directly into streams, and withdrew a rule for groundwater protections at uranium mines. Trump is allowing companies to break air pollution laws, using COVID-19 as a cover, even though air pollution increases asthma and asthma increases COVID’s lethality.
Undoing an Obama plan, Trump’s people refused to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide used on about 50 kinds of fruits, nuts, grains, and cereals, and linked to serious damage to children’s health. They also approved broad use of sulfoxaflor, which harms bees.
Many of these moves are going forward, causing damage that will take many years to undo. Other ongoing damage will be more permanent. Many of the Trump Administration’s actions are being contested in courts, so it pays to keep an eye on these developments.
But it will pay more to vote these destroyers of America the Beautiful, and of our health, out of office. Even Richard Nixon might agree, Trump has to go. That’s our only hope for making America great again.
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Carl Safina, an ecologist and a MacArthur Fellow, holds the Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founder of The Safina Center. His most recent book is Becoming Wild; How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.