Democracy: A Journal of Ideas · Nature and the Law

A new movement is working to protect our environment through the recognition of its fundamental rights. It’s an idea whose time has come.

Mari Margil
This article was first published on Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on December 20, 2016.

The election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States sent a shiver down the spines of millions of Americans who care about the environment.

Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and a “hoax,” while saying very little, if anything, on the environment itself. Of course, climate change is occurring and accelerating at a rate far faster than scientific models predicted, with temperatures in the Arctic 20 degrees Celsius above normal and sea ice at a record low. Further, species are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than natural background rates, and ecosystems, such as coral reefs, are collapsing.

All of this is happening pre-President Trump.

With his cabinet picks including climate change denier Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, nominated to head up the Environmental Protection Agency, and climate change skeptic, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, to head up the Energy Department, there is little reason to believe a President Trump will take action to slow the course of global warming or protect nature.

Indeed, Trump promised to roll back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which requires power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He also promised to revive coal mining. However, the existential threat posed to the environment would necessarily continue regardless of who occupies the White House, unless a fundamental change in humankind’s relationship with the natural world takes place.

So, the question remains, what’s to be done?