RIGHT THERE ON page one, it explains that our job is to exercise careful dominion over the planet, which God has just made and found good. It’s literally job one.
So let’s just list a few of the things that have happened over the last four years in this country to see how we’re doing. The administration has, according to The New York Times:
Dramatically weakened the fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks; canceled a requirement that oil and gas companies even report their methane emissions, at precisely the moment that methane emissions (a key greenhouse gas) are soaring; weakened federal rules to prevent air pollution in national parks; withdrawn from the Paris climate accords, the only global effort to slow climate change; shrunk national monuments to allow for more oil drilling; pushed through plans for pipelines despite massive resistance from farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans in their path; permitted the use of seismic air guns for oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic, despite the danger to marine life that had led to a ban; opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (the largest wildlife refuge in the country) to oil and gas drilling; revoked Obama-era flood standards for new federal projects requiring that sea level rise be considered; reversed Obama-era rules on sport hunting so that it’s now legal to bait grizzly bears with grease-soaked doughnuts; revoked a rule preventing coal companies from dumping mining debris in streams; blocked plans to mandate more efficient light bulbs; stopped payments we’d promised to the Green Climate Fund, which is designed to help poor countries reduce carbon emissions; and restarted the sale of plastic bottles in national parks. Believe me, I could go on.
Is this because circumstances are making it clear that pollution is under control, or that the environment is not all that important? Well, in the last four years we’ve seen the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on planet Earth (130 degrees in August in Death Valley). We’ve seen the largest rainstorm in U.S. history, when Hurricane Harvey dropped 5 feet of water on parts of Texas. We’ve seen massive flooding across the Midwest, and we’ve seen fires in California so massive they formed their own weather systems. By midsummer, many residents of the Bay Area were carrying two masks: One worked to prevent the spread of COVID-19; the other protected their lungs from the smoke pouring out of the forest. Every one of these plagues, it almost goes without saying, hit the poor and the vulnerable hardest—the same people who can’t breathe because there’s a police officer’s knee on their neck also can’t breathe because there’s a power plant down the street pumping out particulates.
So it seems clear to me that we are failing to meet that first instruction laid down in Genesis. I’m sorry if this seems simplistic. It’s just how it is.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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