A new administration has its environmental work cut out for it.
PUBLISHED: THE HILL: Changing America by Cyril Christo, Opinion Contributor November 11, 2020
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” —Ansel Adams
It felt like a second D-Day last week — D for the hard-earned victory of the better half of Democracy, and decency, and not despondency, destruction, delinquency, despair and division. It was the week we could have lost the world — the Earth, the air, the water and the children, the future essentially. Getting and spending way beyond our means, we have been laying waste to the environment for a while now, but never more than during the past four years.
Between an unprecedented election in a country laid low by an unseen microscopic enemy of life and the fateful day when the U.S. left the Paris climate accord, would we ever return to our senses?
Will we regain some ballast, some measure of coherence and sanity? The divisions run through our country like a great rift from the shores of Anchorage all the way to Miami Beach. The country is adrift and politically perhaps irreparably so. But one thing is sure, we could have lost the world that day. The malaise in America runs deep but the environmental abuse and misuse of power cannot be allowed to poison future generations.
What kind of leader would revoke, repeal and repel 100 environmental rules meant to safeguard the health of a country and by extension safeguard this part of the world? What kind of environmental illiteracy would urge, prompt, exhort such madness? Except if one were in total cahoots with only oil and gas. In four brief years, a certain administration was invested in and vested in abrogating everything that supports life. The EPA carried out these famed rollbacks as if the American populace counted for naught, as if future generations were mere abstractions or distractions on a balance sheet. The very words used, “We have fulfilled President Trump’s promises to provide certainty for states, tribes, and local governments, delivering on President Trump’s commitment to return the agency to its core mission: providing cleaner air, water and land to the American people.”
