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On the banks of the Fox River near Green Bay, Wis., where I grew up in the early 1950s after the explosion of coal-fired industry during World War II, the river was a toxic brew and the air so full of coal particulates that 90% of visits to eye doctors were to take cinders out of people’s eyes. I remember those visits, and the asthma resulting from the terrible air, and the parental injunction not to touch the river water.
Then the tide turned. With rivers on fire and oil spills in the news, Earth Day erupted on April 22, 1970, and on Dec. 2, 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency “to protect human health and the environment,” inspired by the awareness and commitment of ordinary citizens aroused by that first Earth Day of environmental action. Since then a series of additional laws and amendments, many bipartisan, have dramatically cleaned the nation’s air and water, protected wilderness and wild rivers and even protected life on Earth from a dangerous collapse of the beneficial ozone layer.
The economic boom in the U.S. and Europe since Earth Day 1970 is a testimony to the truth that societies can create both stunning economic progress and fierce protections for public health, water and natural areas as new challenges arise, such as PFAS, gender-bending chemicals and the biggest challenge of them all, climate change.
Enter Trump 2.0. One of now President Donald Trump’s earliest edicts was to scrub the vocabularies of scientists and officials doing work for or with the federal government. Among the forbidden words: “clean energy,” “climate crisis,” “climate science,” “environmental quality,” “health disparity” and simply “pollution.” On the other hand, Trump, in full fealty to the epically rich global fossil fuel industry, loves coal, oil and gas, and despises wind and solar energy, never mind whatever devastation to the health of the body politic. Meanwhile, the dispassionate Keeling Curve, measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, continues its relentless upward climb, this Earth Day at about 430 parts per million, already well above the 350 ppm scientists once proposed as an upper limit before the climate begins to spin out of control from all the added trapped heat, fuel for devastation.
Yet Trump’s anti-climate science behavior is no accident, as fossil-fueled riches have propelled him and the fossil-fueled Republican party down this path. Take his close pal Vladimir Putin. Russia has one industry, oil and gas. (Anyone bought a Russian car lately, or a toaster, a pack of gum?) Aside from whatever shenanigans and business dealings they conspired in Trump’s Miss Universe days in Moscow, Trump’s dedication to Putin is mutually fossil-fueled, certainly why Trump’s election campaigns were fueled by Russian election interference. In the U.S., the fossil-fueled Heritage Foundation, inventor of the Project 2025 that inspired Trump’s head-in-the-sand erasures, is not conservative by any measure. Faking a concern for Christianity, gender and other social issues, it runs the fossil fuel playbook to the letter.
The Earth has seen many dramatic changes in its 4.5-billion-year history, but few in the 2000 years of our climate-stable, agriculture-based civilization. But with fossil-fueled Trump and Project 2025 at the helm, the future points toward unimaginable devastation already underway. Just ask the citizens of Asheville, N.C., always a haven from hurricanes. Then on Sept. 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene crashed the party, its path over an abnormally warm Gulf of Mexico, which increased the storm’s rapid intensification and epic rainfall. Ask the citizens of Asheville today about the climate crisis as they struggle to rebuild from the devastation. They are having an unhappy Earth Day. But at least they can talk about it.
