In November, Donald Trump officially notified the United Nations of his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, which will take place one year from now. It has been clear for two shameful years that this was his plan, and it comes as no surprise, but is a mere deepening of the brand of shame upon our nation, which will soon be the only country in the world outside of the agreement. Though widely opposed by a majority of Americans, the president is single-mindedly pushing through with his agenda to please a narrow base and theoretical American manufacturing interests (many of whom have publicly condemned the withdrawal).
His act is not a historical anomaly, however; instead, it falls in line with America’s longstanding disregard for the environment and its prioritization of gallingly selfish business interests over all other concerns. As documented in Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth, the United States has been responsible for weakening every major climate treaty since the practice of negotiating climate treaties began, and never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to the Paris Agreement. Though our departure from the Paris Agreement is tantamount to spitting in the face of the rest of the world—will they ever consider sanctioning us, I wonder?—and comes at a time when awareness of the destructive effects of climate change is growing daily, the roots of this behavior run deeper than Donald Trump and predate our disruption of international climate treaties.
The expansion of our nation was founded on genocide, the displacement and extermination of the Native Americans, who were viewed as a threat and an impediment to the divinely favored white settlers who claimed the land for their own, from sea to shining sea. In doing so, we drove out a civilization that revered the earth, made a minimal impact on it, and sought to preserve it for future generations, replacing it with a culture that viewed itself as superior to all other forms of life, exploited the earth for maximum profit, and had no tradition of preserving the land it was just taking possession of. (This attitude lingers.)
The ecological impacts of this were felt immediately. After so depleting the beaver population of Europe that pelts were hard to come by, European nations began establishing outposts in North America to slaughter the beavers there and send the pelts home. The fur trade played a large role in the early colonial history of the country, and predictably led to widespread destruction of the species, just as it had in Europe. The beaver was hunted in staggering numbers, with no care for the survival of the species—not even a selfish concern to stabilize beaver numbers so that the trade could continue sustainably into the future. They hunted whatever they could, took the profit, and pushed west to find more, keeping up that model until the beaver population had been almost entirely wiped out on the continent. Though they have rebounded in the last century or so now that they are somewhat protected, the beaver population today is less than a tenth of what it originally was.
James Fenimore Cooper, often considered the first “American” novelist, who introduced the American backwoodsman to an international audience, decried a “slaughter of pigeons” in his 1823 novel The Pioneers, his first of five works featuring his hero, Natty Bumpo. This slaughter he witnessed and catalogued was part of a century of the wanton destruction of the passenger pigeon, a bird that once numbered in the billions, which was driven extinct by the end of the 19th century. The buffalo was similarly hunted to near-extinction. Both campaigns of mass slaughter were driven by a combination of immense indifference, greed on the part of hunters, and a view that these animals were disposable and were in some ways an obstacle to American interests. The passenger pigeons were disliked by westward-moving farmers, who saw in them a threat to their crops. The buffalo obstructed railroads and allowed the Native Americans to continue their traditional nomadic way of existence. So both species were hunted ruthlessly, exterminated savagely, and driven to extinction and near-extinction, respectively, in spite of their unthinkable numbers. The only thing more staggering than the numbers in which both species once existed on this continent are the concerted efforts Americans made to kill them.
These days, we are not hunting animals to extinction in this country, though species are going extinct here and around the world due to overdevelopment, pollution, and climate change. Under the current administration, efforts to drill and mine every extractable resource have been promoted, while attempts to protect endangered animals, ecosystems, sacred lands, and water sources have come under attack. The Endangered Species Act of 1970 was a remarkable American bill in that it called for the protection of endangered species regardless of the economic effects of doing so. That is the very language in the bill that Trump’s administration has removed so that this anomalous blip in American policy can be scrubbed out and industry can be freed to ransack any bit of land it sets its sights on. News of the changes brought consternation from environmental groups and a spate of critical news articles, and the average citizen probably didn’t like the sound of it, but the masses have not yet taken to the streets on behalf of the sage grouse.
Along with attacks on the Endangered Species Act, the Trump administration has also announced rollbacks of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and many other environmental regulations, and is opening up lands to drilling within protected areas like our national parks (including the Grand Canyon) and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In doing so, the administration is resuming another longstanding American tradition—breaking treaties. Just as it broke treaties with Native Americans for over a century, promising them land and then taking it away again, our government is now breaking treaties with the Earth, promising it protection and then taking it away again in order to let business interests invade and exploit whatever areas have not been exploited yet. Manifest Destiny lingers on, and industry and the right wing won’t rest until they’ve drilled every ounce of oil, fracked every cubic inch of gas, and mined every last atom of uranium. (On a side note, in the predatory global economy, American corporations have also expanded Manifest Destiny beyond our coastal borders–let’s get all of Africa in Nike shoes and shorts, made in our factories in Indonesia!)
As egregious as these new national environmental policies are, representing a resurgence in government negligence, they do not represent further environmental carelessness in the attitude of the average American. But that attitude was bad enough already, and does not differ greatly from the attitude held by the first settlers to rip through the land in pursuit of their own profit. We do not live our lives with future generations in mind. We do not even live with the awareness of the impact our actions are having on the earth within our own lifetime.
Today we do not find ourselves shooting out of train windows at buffalo, but we continue to do thoughtless harm to the earth through our unsustainable consumerist way of life. We drive everywhere, burning fossil fuels and burning up the planet, with no real end in sight. Everything we buy is packaged in plastic, and we throw the bulk of it away. We are born into a life of consumption, and with that consumption comes inevitable disposal, and we are rarely challenged to seriously question the process; if anything, we uphold the ability to buy and dispose recklessly as some sort of warped status symbol or celebration of our “freedom.” And the madness has spread. Like a cultural pandemic, we have exported this vaunted American way of life around the world, hand-in-hand with American goods. Now here and around the world, we have mountains of waste as high as the towers of buffalo skulls that once haunted the prairies. We choke our rivers with plastic (a substance first invented and widely adopted in America) and unleash it upon the oceans as an invasive species until there is no square mile of ocean floor that has not been touched with our presence. The majesty of setting foot (or an ocean-exploring craft) on ground which no human being has seen before has been forever lost as that ground is already covered with our plastic. There are uninhabited islands of the Pacific where the birds live on the landfills of humans who have never lived there.
The culture that began in this country with hunting its animals to extinction has culminated in a consumerist culture that displays, and to some extent is even predicated upon, an insatiable greed and an incredible lack of foresight. To have any hope for a sane future, we will have to come to grips with our reckless past and recognize the way that it has continued to shape our practices today. It will take a willful effort to transform our consciousness and our culture, reversing our focus on maximum short-term comfort and profit that drove and still drives the plundering of this country, and restoring the indigenous vision of this land as a shared good meant to be enjoyed with respect and passed down intact to generations who will follow us.